UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


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ANATOLE  FRANCE 


BY 


LEWIS  PIAGET  SHANKS 


CHICAGO  LONDON 

THE  OPEN  COURT  PUBLISHING  COMPANY 

1919 


COPYKIGHT  BY 

THE  OPEN  COUHT  PUBUSHING  COMPANY 
1919 


college 
librajy 

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PARENTIBVS   MEIS   DILECTIS 


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247i.53 


CONTENTS 

rAGK 

Preface   vii 

I.  The  Child  in  Old  Paris  1 

11.  The  Youth  and  the  Parnassian 19 

III,  From  Naturalist  to  Skeptic :  Sylvestre  Bon- 

nard  (1879-82)    37 

IV.  The  Dreamer  of  the  Past :  Early  Tales  and 

Thais  (1883-92)    59 

V.  The  Monk  of  Letters:    Criticism  and  the 

Reaction  to  Life  (1887-92)    77 

VI.  The  Disciple  of  Voltaire :  The  Abbe  Jerome 

and  Fra  Giovanni  (1893-95)  101 

VII.  The  Ironic  Realist :  Professor  Bergeret  and 

the  "Affair"  (1897-1901)  127 

VIII.  The  Socialist  and  the  Reformer:  Crainque- 

bille  (1902-05)  153 

IX.  The  Historian  and  the  Satirist  of  Human- 
ity: The  Penguins  (1906-1914)   175 

X.  Postscript  and  Conclusion  205 

Chronology  of  the  Principal  Works  of  Anatole 

France 233 

Index 237 


PREFACE 

AMONG  the  would-be  volunteers  of  1914 
L  was  the  virtual  Dean  of  French  letters,  a 
man  of  seventy  years.  We  were  surprised, 
not  at  his  age  but  at  his  transformation;  for 
nearly  twenty  years  he  had  preached  pacifism, 
and  the  brotherhood  of  man.  We  were  sur- 
prised because  he  was  Anatole  France.  Yet 
scarcely  twenty-five  years  before,  this  radical 
was  known  as  a  skeptic,  an  intellectual  hedon- 
ist, a  dilettante;  in  1889  no  one  could  foresee 
the  future  dreamer  of  reform  in  the  nihilistic 
pages  of  Thais.  So  his  final  heroic  inconsis- 
tency is  only  a  part  of  a  greater  problem,  a 
single  phase  in  a  life's  drama,  whereby  a  skep- 
tic and  a  pessimist  developed  into  a  man  of 
action. 

This  problem,  this  drama,  must  be  the  excuse 
of  the  present  volume.  Its  hero  is  perhaps  our 
greatest  living  man  of  letters.  For  nearly  half 
a  century  Anatole  France  has  found  the  muses 


gracious.  He  has  climbed  the  Sacred  Mount; 
he  has  had  for  many  years  his  cult  and  his 
votaries.  But  his  company  might  be  larger — 
ought  to  be  larger  now  that  we  have  such  ad- 
mirable translations  of  the  master.  His  com- 
pany must  be  larger,  if  reason  and  humanity 
are  ever  to  do  away  with  war.  If  that  vision 
may  be  brought  ever  so  little  nearer,  if  some 
individualists  and  pessimists  should  find  in  his 
pages  the  Damascus  road  toward  a  broader 
and  brighter  ideal,  this  book  will  find  its  apo- 
logia. 

The  story  of  an  intellectual  Odyssey,  it  was 
prompted  by  the  same  optimism  as  the  modern 
traveler's  log.  In  most  books  of  travel  the  best 
things  are  the  illustrations.  So  with  quotations 
in  biography  and  criticism — ^prudence  no  less 
than  reverence  requires  them.  Moreover,  even 
the  temptation  of  a  ready  camera  is  less  than 
the  desire  to  translate — to  attempt  a  transla- 
tion of  Anatole  France,  a  perpetual  challenge 
despite  the  quality  of  one's  results.  To  quote 
wherever  possible,  to  condense  and  still  quote, 
and  to  strive  to  set  one's  mosaic  in  a  surface  not 
absolutely  disparate  is  of  course  a  bit  presump- 
tuous ;  but  how  else  could  one  present  a  writer 
so  personal,  whose  thoughts  and  impressions 


and  memories  are  day  by  day  woven  into  his 
work? 

With  such  a  Hterary  Proteus,  no  stippled 
portrait  is  worth  a  series  of  sketches.  One  must 
tell  the  history  of  his  ideas — the  story  of  his 
mind's  development.  So,  beginning  with  his 
heredity  and  early  environment,  we  follow  the 
poet  and  thinker  through  his  first  imaginative 
enthusiasm  for  science,  until  his  belief  in  her 
dies  away  in  skepticism  and  he  returns  to  the 
world  of  poetry  and  art.  After  this  conflict  of 
youthful  illusions,  when  a  victorious  intellect 
has  rejected  the  faith  and  effort  which  its  phi- 
losophy finds  vain,  comes  the  second  phase: 
content  now  to  enjoy  his  own  talents,  without 
attempting  to  coordinate  them  to  any  principle 
but  style,  the  erstwhile  Darwinian  develops  his 
skepticism  philosophically  in  order  to  range 
more  freely  in  the  galleries  of  the  past.  This  is 
Anatole  France  in  his  forties,  dilettante  and 
disciple  of  the  later  Renan.  But  he  wearies 
in  the  Palace  of  Art,  grows  sick  of  self  and 
eager  for  a  stronger  draught  of  reality.  Hence 
the  descent  into  the  arena,  provoked  by  the 
Dreyfus  aflPair  and  the  corruption  of  French 
politics :  the  idealist,  the  man  of  heart  and  im- 
agination now  dominates  the  intellectuel.  Then 
comes  the  reaction,  after  less  than  a  decade  of 


contact  with  life — when  the  student  realizes 
that  man  is  not  the  reasonable  creature  he  had 
imagined,  but  a  selfish  animal,  bound  by  inertia 
and  hostile  to  reform;  and  the  genial  irony  of 
his  forties  turns  to  satire,  ending  in  the  sneer 
of  a  cynic  who  can  only  caricature  humanity. 
Anatole  France  is  then  an  idealist  turned  inside 
out  by  life,  an  inverted  idealist  like  Swift  in  his 
last  phase,  distilling  acid  sarcasm  until  again 
he  is  swept  from  philosophy  into  action  by  the 
world  war. 

Now  that  the  conflict  is  ended,  and  statesmen 
are  debating  the  measures  which  make  for 
peace,  it  is  well  to  sharpen  our  vision  and  our 
intellects  by  a  study  of  Anatole  France,  It  is 
good  to  chronicle  his  long  war  upon  war,  his 
stand  against  intolerance  and  social  injustice, 
lest  we  think  that  victory  falls  only  by  the 
sword.  It  will  not  be  useless  to  review  the 
career  of  Anatole  France,  so  typical  of  the 
mingled  idealism  and  pessimism  of  the  last  cen- 
tury. Secure  in  the  larger  perspective  of  a 
conflict  which  ends  an  epoch,  yet  remembering 
the  sufferings  of  a  generation  defeated  and 
thrown  back  upon  itself  by  the  lack  of  a  hopeful 
national  life,  we  can  understand  his  personality 
as  we  can  explain  his  books.  If  we  read  them 
in  this  spirit,  which  is  that  of  a  philosophic 


pilgrim,  even  uncomfortable  inns  will  merge 
into  the  shadows  of  the  panorama  viewed  from 
the  armchair  at  the  journey's  end.  To  read 
all  of  Anatole  France  is  to  see  how  a  sensitive 
artist  found  himself  in  an  unfavorable  environ- 
ment, and  by  giving  us  his  egoism  in  patient 
works  of  art,  proved,  even  more  than  by  his 
propaganda,  a  great  "doer"  and  a  real  bene- 
factor of  humanity.  After  all,  'Tartiste  doit 
aimer  la  vie  et  montrer  qu'elle  est  belle.  Sans 
lui,  nous  en  douterions." 

L.  P.  S. 
Franklin  Inn  Club, 

Philadelphia. 


CHAPTER  I 


THE  CHILD  IN  OLD   PARIS. 


46^  I  'HE  first  idea  which  I  got  of  the  uni- 
A  verse,"  says  Anatole  France  in  Pierre 
Noziere,  "came  to  me  from  my  old  pictorial 
Bible.  It  was  a  series  of  seventeenth-century 
woodcuts,  with  a  Garden  of  Eden  fresh  and 
fertile  as  a  Lowland  landscape ....  Every  even- 
ing, under  the  lamp,  I  would  turn  its  ancient 
leaves,  until  sleep,  the  delicious  sleep  of  child- 
hood, carried  me  off  in  its  warm  shadows,  and 
the  patriarchs,  the  apostles,  and  the  lace-decked 
ladies  lived  on  through  my  dreams  their  super- 
natural lives.  My  Bible  had  become  for  me  the 
most  vivid  reality,  and  to  it  I  strove  to  conform 
the  universe." 

His  universe  at  that  time  was  the  sleepy  old 
Quai  Malaquais.  There,  in  the  heart  of  Paris, 
Anatole  France  was  born,  the  sixteenth  of 
April,  1844;  and  his  eyes  first  opened  on  the 
Seine  and  the  Louvre,  the  Cite  and  the  carven 
towers  of  Notre  Dame.  But  the  universe  grows 


with  the  growing  legs  of  its  children.  At  five, 
this  little  world  extended  from  the  Rue  Bona- 
parte to  the  He  Saint-Louis,  and  the  **River  of 
Glory,"  which  he  followed  every  day  with  his 
nurse,  gave  him  back  the  Noah's  Ark  of  his 
Bible  in  the  floating  baths  of  La  Samaritaine. 
To  the  east,  beyond  the  Pont  d'Austerlitz,  he 
saw  in  imagination  the  mysterious  realms  of 
the  Scriptures,  and  the  Jardin  des  Plantes  was 
clearly  the  Garden  of  Eden,  for  hadn't  his 
mother  told  him  that  Eden  was  a  garden  with 
trees  and  all  the  animals  of  the  Creation? 

So  at  least  we  read  in  Pierre  N osier e.  Here, 
in  the  exquisite  Livre  de  mon  ami,  and  in  Le 
petit  Pierre,  now  publishing  in  the  Revue  de 
Paris,  is  set  down  a  man's  story  of  his  boy- 
hood ;  and  if  sentiment  in  an  ironist  is  an  index 
of  candor,  these  books  contain  as  much  truth  as 
poetry.  Theirs  is  no  merely  symbolic  truth, 
transformed  by  time  and  the  artistic  tempera- 
ment.^   Real  memories  alone  could  yield  pages 

^  Confirmation  of  this  may  be  found  in  a  letter  of  Anatole 
France  to  a  man  of  letters,  reproduced  in  Frangois  Carez's 
Auteurs  contemporains  (p.  82)  :  "Je  vous  confie  que  tout  ce 
qui,  dans  ce  volume  ile  Livre  de  mon  ami),  concerne  le  petit 
Noziere,  forme  un  recit  exact  de  mon  enfance,  sous  cette  re- 
serve que  mon  pere  etait  non  medecin  mais  libraire  sur  le  quai 
Voltaire  et  que  les  choses  domestiques  etaient  plus  etroites  et 
plus  humbles  chez  nous  qu'elles  ne  sont  chez  un  petit  medecin 
de  quartier.  Le  caractere  de  mon  pere  n'est  pas  moins  con- 
serve dans  celui  du  docteur  Noziere.  Mon  pere  est  devenu 
un  homme  instruit,  presque  savant,  i  la  fin  de  sa  vie." 


so  charming,  so  significant ;  not  one  but  reveals 
the  future  poet,  already  living  in  his  world  of 
dreams. 

"My  cosmography,"  he  says  in  Pierre  No- 
ziere,  '*my  cosmography  was  immense.  I  held 
the  Quai  Malaquais,  where  my  room  was,  to  be 
the  center  of  the  world.  The  green  bedroom, 
in  which  my  mother  put  my  little  bed  beside 
her  own,  I  looked  upon  as  the  point  on  which 
Heaven  shed  its  rays  and  graces,  as  you  may 
see  in  the  pictures  of  the  saints.  And  these  four 
walls,  so  familiar  to  me,  were  filled  with  mys- 
tery none  the  less. 

"At  night  in  my  cot-bed,  I  used  to  see  strange 
faces,  and  all  at  once  the  warm  and  cozy  bed- 
room, lit  by  the  last  dying  gleams  of  the  fire- 
place, would  open  wide  to  the  invasion  of  the 
supernatural  world. 

"Legions  of  horned  devils  danced  their 
rounds;  then,  slowly,  a  lady  of  black  marble 
passed  by,  weeping,  and  it  was  only  later  that 
I  found  out  that  these  hobgoblins  were  dancing 
in  my  brain .... 

"According  to  my  system,  in  which  you  must 
recognize  that  candor  which  gives  to  primitive 
cosmogonies  their  charm,  the  earth  formed  a 
large  circle  around  my  house.  Every  day  I 
would  meet,  coming  and  going  in  the  streets, 


people  who  seemed  occupied  with  a  strange  and 
amusing  game,  the  game  of  Hfe.  I  decided 
that  there  were  a  great  many  of  them,  perhaps 
more  than  a  hundred. 

"I  did  not  think  that  they  were  under  abso- 
lutely fortunate  influences,  sheltered  like  myself 
from  all  anxiety.  To  tell  the  truth,  I  did  not 
think  that  they  were  as  real  as  I  was;  I  was 
not  absolutely  sure  that  they  were  real  people, 
and  when  from  my  window  I  saw  them  pass, 
very  tiny,  over  the  Pont  des  Arts,  they  seemed 
to  me  playthings  rather  than  persons,  so  that  I 
was  almost  as  happy  as  the  boy-giant  in  the 
fairy-tale,  who  sat  on  a  mountain  and  played 
with  trees  and  cabins,  cows  and  sheep,  shep- 
herds and  shepherd-girls." 

Such  in  embryo  is  the  creative  vision,  the 
artist's  vision.  Certainly  it  is  no  ordinary  stock 
which  produced  this  dreamy,  imaginative  boy. 
An  only  son,  born  in  his  father's  fortieth  year, 
Jacques-Anatole  Thibault  owes  to  that  father 
much  more  than  the  famous  pseudonym.  Noel 
Thibault  too  was  a  man  of  letters  and  a  lover 
of  the  past.  "France,  libraire,"  for  thus  he 
signed  his  articles  on  bibliography,  kept  a  book- 
shop at  9  Quai  Malaquais,  in  the  fine  old  build- 
ing so  long  occupied  by  his  successor  Cham- 
pion.    A  Royalist,  devoutly  Catholic,  a  Ven- 


deen  in  origins  and  in  every  sympathy,  he  had 
served  in  the  body-guard  of  Charles  X,  and  he 
loved  the  ancien  regime  as  he  hated  the  Revo- 
lution,^ Originally  from  Anjou,  Noel  Thibault 
had  all  the  proverbial  gentleness  of  the  Ange- 
vin ;  he  is  depicted  for  us  in  Sylvestre  Bonnard's 
memories  of  his  father,  ironical,  indulgent,  dis- 
illusioned: "il  etait  fatigue,  et  il  aimait  sa  fa- 
tigue." 

The  serenity  of  the  Anjou  country,  with  its 
placid  rivers  and  its  rolling  hills — la  douceur 
angevine — thus  finds  a  reflection  in  the  artist 
and  his  art.  Yet  if  Anatole  France  shows  this 
regional  type  in  its  amenity,  he  has  no  less  the 
Angevin  shrewdness  and  irony.  Every  lover 
of  Taine's  theory  must  rejoice  in  France's  remi- 
niscences of  his  grandmother,  neither  Royalist 
nor  pious,  but  keen-witted,  practical,  and  pagan, 
a  true  disciple  of  Voltaire.  "She  had  no  more 
piety  than  a  bird,"  says  her  grandson:  "she 
clearly  belonged  to  the  eighteenth  century." 
Significant,  too,  is  her  prediction  that  the  boy 
Anatole  would  be  "a  very  different  man  from 
his  father." 

Grand'mere  was  right.  The  child  had  more 
than  distinction  of  intellect,  a  much  greater 

2  Yet  no  one  knew  that  period  better,  as  his  learned  bibliog- 
raphy shows. 


8 

gift  than  his  father's  sterile  scholarship.  He 
had  the  creative  vitality,  the  exuberance  of 
fancy  and  imagination  which  alone  makes  the 
artist.  Like  the  old  Bible,  this  came  to  him 
from  his  mother,  from  the  merry,  active, 
beauty-loving  mother  so  affectionately  por- 
trayed in  her  son's  books.  Naive,  mystic,  can- 
didly religious — a  true  daughter  of  Bruges — 
she  used  to  read  to  him  the  Lives  of  the  Saints, 
and  the  charm  of  the  old  stories  "filled  the 
soul  of  the  child  with  wonderment  and  love." 
A  dreamer  already,  he  felt  profoundly  the  mys- 
tic poetry  of  religious  legend;  his  first  hope  of 
military  glory  gave  way  to  a  dream  of  saint- 
hood, and  he  lived  out  the  sacred  stories  with 
all  the  seriousness  of  real  experience.  His  re- 
fusal to  eat,  his  distribution  of  coppers  and  toys 
to  the  poor,  his  attempt  to  make  a  hair  shirt 
from  the  wiry  cover  of  an  old  armchair,  and  the 
whipping  he  received  from  an  inconsiderate 
maid,  are  related  with  inimitable  grace  and 
irony  in  the  eighth  chapter  of  Le  Livre  de  mon 
ami:  finally,  "the  difficulty  of  practising  saint- 
hood in  family  life"  made  him  resolve  to  seek 
a  hermitage  in  the  Jardin  des  Plantes.  There, 
on  the  morrow,  he  would  live  alone  with  all  the 
animals  of  the  Creation ;  there  he  would  see,  like 
Saint  Anthony,  the  faun  and  the  centaur,  and 


perhaps  the  angels  would  visit  him  beneath  the 
cedar  of  Lebanon,  on  the  hill  where,  in  imagi- 
nation, he  saw  "God  the  Father  with  his  while 
beard  and  his  blue  robe,  with  arms  outstretched 
to  bless  him,  beside  the  antilope  and  the  ga- 
zelle." But  when  the  future  author  of  Thais 
confides  this  plan  to  his  mother  as  she  combs 
his  hair,  and  she  asks  him  why  he  wants  to  be 
a  hermit,  it  becomes  plain  that  his  dream  of 
glory  is  not  the  glory  of  the  saints :  "I  want  to 
be  famous,"  he  replies,  ''and  put  on  my  visiting- 
cards  'Hermit  and  Saint  of  the  Calendar,'  just 
as  papa  puts  on  his :  'Laureate  of  the  Academy 
of  Medicine.' " 

True  or  apocryphal,  this  ended  his  ascetic 
projects — less  successful  even  than  the  boyish 
prank  of  Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre,  who  actu- 
ally put  a  similar  plan  into  execution.  After 
all  there  were  other  things  to  interest  him,  pris- 
oned as  he  was  in  the  quiet  imaginative  life  of 
an  only  child.  "It  was  not  large,  that  life  of 
mine,"  he  tells  us,  '''but  it  was  a  life,  that  is, 
the  center  of  things,  the  middle  of  the  world." 
The  very  opening  of  his  mother's  closets,  piled 
high  with  mysterious  forbidden  boxes,  filled 
him  with  poetic  curiosity.  He  had  his  play- 
things— and  the  playthings  of  his  dreams.  He 
wondered  at  "the  number  of  lines  and  faces 


10 

that  could  be  got  out  of  a  pencil."  He  felt, 
too,  the  charm  of  flowers,  of  perfumes,  the  de- 
lights of  food  and  dress.  But  what  he  loved 
most,  he  confesses,  more  than  any  of  these 
things,  was  everything  together,  the  house,  the 
air,  the  light,  the  life  of  his  very  downy  nest. 
After  all,  the  practice  of  asceticism  might  have 
been  hard  for  this  young  Epicurean, 

Not  a  desert  cave,  but  a  desk  and  a  library, 
is  the  proper  stage  for  a  poet's  seclusion.  And 
to  such  things  the  future  writer  turned  instinc- 
tively. "I  lived  with  my  books,"  he  tells  us, 
"my  pictures,  my  paste-pot,  my  color  boxes, 
and  all  the  belongings  of  a  bright  yet  delicate 
boy,  already  sedentary,  naively  initiating  him- 
self by  his  toys  into  that  feeling  for  form  and 
color,  the  source  of  so  much  pain  and  so  much 
joy.  Already  I  had  a  bent  toward  desk  work,  a 
love  of  pictures  cut  out  patiently  by  the  evening 
lamp,  a  profound  feeling  for  things  pictorial. 
I  have  never  needed,  even  in  my  early  years,  to 
possess  things  in  order  to  enjoy  them."  This 
is  the  future  biographer  of  Sylvestre  Bonnard 
and  the  Maid  of  France. 

Given  such  a  nature,  a  boy  needs  only  a  hero 
to  shape  a  definite  ideal.  The  hero  appeared 
in  the  person  of  a  collector,  a  hero  of  the  desk 
and  the  card-catalogue.  Clad  in  flowered  dress- 


11 

ing-gown  and  nightcap,  this  old  scholar,  immor- 
talized under  the  sobriquet  of  Old  Le  Beau, 
passed  his  days  cataloguing  books  and  medals 
in  a  house  packed  to  the  roof  with  curiosities. 
So  Anatole,  at  ten,  "thought  it  finer  to  make 
card-catalogues  than  to  win  battles.  He  would 
catalogue,  and  I,  with  eyes  wide  open  and  bated 
breath,  would  admire  him.  I  did  not  imagine 
that  there  could  be  any  finer  business  to  give 
one's  life  to.  But  I  was  mistaken.  A  printer  was 
found  to  print  the  catalogue  of  Qld  Le  Beau, 
and  then  I  saw  my  friend  correcting  the  proofs. 
He  would  put  mysterious  signs  on  the  margin 
of  the  leaves.  Then  I  understood  that  this  was 
the  finest  occupation  in  the  world,  and  I  prom- 
ised myself  that  I  too  would  some  day  have  my 
proof-sheets  to  revise." 

The  picturesque  dressing-gown  of  the  dis- 
ciple is  of  gray  frieze,  his  cap  of  red  velvet,  and 
the  proof-sheets  have  come,  so  numerous  that 
all  the  first  delight — a  veritable  justification  of 
the  universe — has  long  since  passed  away.  And 
it  is  not  hard  to  see  how  the  old  antiquary,  in 
his  house  piled  with  all  the  flotsam  of  time,  set 
the  example  of  intellectual  curiosity  and  patient 
scholarship  that  even  a  poet  needs  to  see  clearly 
into  the  labyrinth  of  the  past.  To  such  an  ex- 
ample, possibly,  is  due  the  "Life  of  Joan  of 


12 

Arc."  But  the  reader  wonders  in  vain  who  was 
this  Monsieur  Le  Beau,  the  collector  who  lives 
in  art  by  his  kindness  to  a  lonely  child. 

Was  he  his  father,  the  book-lover  and  bib- 
liographer of  the  Quai  Malaquais?  After  all 
a  father  is  a  boy's  first  hero,  and  a  father's 
trade  his  first  dream  of  his  own.  Or  was  he  pos- 
sibly one  of  his  father's  patrons,  "le  bibliophile 
Jacob"  or  the  collector  Marmier,  met  in  the 
quiet  old  shop  where  the  boy  "played  with 
dumpy  duodecimos  as  with  dolls"?  In  any 
case  we  must  not  overlook  the  bookstore.  It 
was  here  that  young  Anatole  grew  up,  sur- 
rounded by  the  motley  ranks  of  an  ever-chan- 
ging library.^  Here  it  was  that  he  got  his  first 
notions  of  history  and  society,  from  books  and 
from  the  conversations  of  his  father  and  his 
father's  friends — a  memory  which  he  used  later 
in  picturing  the  book-shop  of  Paillot;  and  as 
the  patrons  of  this  old  Royalist  were  mostly 
Royalists  too,  ci-devant  aristocrats  and  conser- 
vatives, their  remarks  on  the  Revolution  could 
not  fail  to  influence  the  future  author  of  Les 
Dieux  out  soif.  It  is  easy  to  imagine  them — 
some  of  the  older  ones,  perhaps,  wearing  the 
high  neck-cloths  and  tight  trousers  Daumier 
loved  to  draw,  unmindful  of  the  shy  little  lad 
reading  in  the  corner;  but  it  was  for  him  that 


13 

they  talked,  after  all.  Disciples  of  Voltaire, 
they  were  the  first  to  show  him,  in  their  endless 
arguments,  the  multiplicity  of  truth. 

Thus  the  old  bookstore  by  the  Seine  became 
the  nursery  of  a  genius.  In  ludicrous  contrast, 
we  have  the  picture  of  his  first  school,  a  "highly- 
recommended"  establishment  of  the  Faubourg 
Saint-Germain.  There,  in  a  room  full  of  mis- 
chief-loving youngsters  presided  over  by  an 
absent-minded  spinster,  he  made  acquaintance 
with  the  world  of  human  society,  discovered 
the  practical  life  and  found  his  first  friend  in 
a  boy  who  taught  him  to  raise  silkworms  in  his 
desk.  There,  too,  the  charms  of  poetry  were 
revealed  to  him,  when  the  melancholy  school- 
mistress read  to  the  class  her  melancholy  bal- 
lad Paiivre  Jeanne.  The  tears  which  he  shed 
on  that  occasion  brought  him  not  the  cross  of 
honor,  but  the  vision  of  that  beauty  which 
rhyme  and  rhythm  give. 

Practical  education,  however,  was  not  to  be 
gained  here.  After  copying  for  six  weeks  the 
same  line  of  poetry,  the  boy  was  withdrawn 
from  the  pension  by  his  dissatisfied  parents. 
Although  not  rich,  they  now  chose  for  him  the 
College  Stanislas,  an  expensive  and  aristocratic 
school  directed  by  Jesuits.  At  Stanislas,  "un 
vieux  college  un  peu  monacal,"  he  came  under 


14 

the  instruction  of  ecclesiastics,  learned  the 
poetry  that  legend  and  ritual  inspire.  Esthet- 
ically  the  priesthood  may  well  have  had  its 
moment  of  attraction  for  him.  He  may  have 
lived  in  sympathy  the  episode  of  young  Pieda- 
gnel  in  L'Orme  dii  mail.  In  any  case  the  Church 
gave  him  her  best  for  his  intellectual  training ; 
like  Jules  Lemaitre,  he  enjoyed  the  discipline 
which  perfected  the  mind  of  Renan.  "In  the 
Temple,"  said  the  good  Abbe  Jerome  Coignard, 
"were  forged  the  hammers  which  destroyed  the 
Temple." 

Nor  must  we  forget,  in  his  education,  the  in- 
estimable influence  of  Paris.  To  such  a  boy, 
responsive  to  the  pictorial,  to  the  charm  of  the 
past,  the  chance  of  living  in  the  City  of  Light 
was  a  veritable  godsend.  "It  does  not  seem  to 
me  possible,"  he  modestly  affirms,  "for  a  man 
to  have  an  absolutely  commonplace  turn  of 
mind,  if  he  has  been  brought  up  on  the  quays 
of  Paris,  opposite  the  Louvre  and  the  Tuileries, 
and  facing  the  glorious  Seine,  which  runs 
amidst  the  belfries  and  towers  and  spires  of 
Old  Paris.  . .  .There,  the  book-stalls,  the  curi- 
osity shops,  and  the  old  print  stores  display  the 
most  beautiful  products  of  art  and  the  most 
interesting  tokens  of  the  past.  Every  shop- 
window  is  an  attraction  for  the  eyes  and  the 


15 

intellect :  the  passer-by  who  knows  how  to  see 
always  carries  away  some  thought,  as  the  bird 
flies  off  with  a  bit  of  straw  for  its  nest." 

When  Anatole  France  was  a  boy,  this  quar- 
ter was  even  richer  in  atmosphere  than  it  is 
to-day.  Old  prints,  old  paintings,  old  books, 
old  furniture — every  foot  of  the  quays  was  full 
of  them.  Carved  credence-tables,  flowered  Jap- 
anese vases,  bits  of  enamel,  faience,  brocaded 
stuffs  and  figured  tapestries  served  to  illustrate 
the  old  books  lying  so  invitingly  open:  the 
famous  curiosity  shop  described  in  Balzac's 
Peau  de  chagrin  shows  what  these  places  used 
to  be.  This  larger  school  Anatole  France  knew 
before  he  ceased  to  wear  short  trousers  and 
embroidered  collars;  "when  we  went  to  the 
Tuileries  Gardens  on  holidays,  we  used  to  pass 
along  this  learned  Quai  Voltaire,  and  as  we 
walked,  hoop  in  hand  and  ball  in  pocket,  we 
used  to  look  into  the  shop-windows  just  like 
the  old  gentlemen,  and  form  our  own  ideas  on 
all  these  strange  things  which  had  come  down 
from  the  past,  from  the  mysterious  past." 

Add  to  this  his  daily  journeys,  first  along 
the  quays,  then  down  that  fascinating  Rue 
Bonaparte  which  takes  one  past  an  endless  row 
of  curio-shops  to  the  Luxembourg  Gardens  and 
the  College  Stanislas,  situated  in  the  Rue  Notre- 


16 

Dame  des  Champs.     Every  day  he  saw  the 

shop-windows,  greeted  the  white  statues  of  the 
gardens  gleaming  against  their  fernhke  back- 
ground of  trees,  felt  all  the  multifarious  life 
of  Old  Paris.  So  the  streets  gave  him  his  first 
understanding  of  the  world.  Here  he  saw  the 
milkwomen,  the  water-carriers,  the  coal-heavers 
at  their  tasks,  and  learned  the  law  of  cheerful 
labor  which  Paris  teaches  in  every  shop  and 
alley.  Like  Coppee,  he  loved  this  humble  Paris, 
only  he  loved  it  still  as  a  spectator.  It  was  all 
a  part  of  his  vision  of  the  universe,  a  poet's 
vision,  destined  to  be  engraven  in  pages  ex- 
pressive as  a  Whistler  etching,  pages  discreetly 
evocative  of  the  Paris  that  we  love. 

He  learned,  in  fine,  that  busy  idling  which 
distinguishes  the  artist  from  the  scholar.  And 
even  in  school  he  retained  the  same  discursive 
spirit:  he  was  constantly  reprimanded  for  his 
devotion  to  interests  "extraneous  to  the  class." 
Yet  he  was  a  good  student,  particularly  in  the 
humanities.  *'You  may  call  me  an  aristocrat 
or  a  mandarin,  but  I  believe  that  six  or  seven 
years  of  literary  culture  give  to  the  mind  pre- 
pared to  receive  it  a  nobility,  a  force  and  a 
beauty  which  is  not  to  be  obtained  by  other 
means." 

At  Stanislas  Anatole  France  received  this 


17 

literary  training.  And  he  was  prepared  for  it. 
Already  Livy  set  him  to  dreaming.  When  his 
old  Jesuit  Latin  master  read  the  sentence :  *'The 
remnants  of  the  Roman  army  reached  Canu- 
sium  through  the  favor  of  the  night,"  he  would 
see  "passing  silently  in  the  moonlight,  over  the 
naked  plain  and  the  long  road  flanked  with 
tombs,  livid  faces,  foul  with  blood  and  dust, 
battered  helmets,  wrenched  and  tarnished 
breast-plates,  broken  swords."  Such  a  vision 
shows  that  Anatole  France  was  already  old 
enough  to  feel  the  grandeur  that  was  Rome. 

"Then  it  was  Virgil,  and  then  Homer.  I  saw 
Thetis  rising  like  a  white  cloud  from  the  sea, 
I  saw  Nausicaa  and  her  companions,  and  the 
palm-tree  of  Delos,  and  the  sea  and  the  earth 
nnd  the  sky,  and  the  tearful  smile  of  Andro- 
mache ....  And  I  understood  it,  I  felt  it.  For 
six  months  I  could  not  leave  the  Odyssey.  . .  .1 
was  with  Ulysses  on  the  wine-dark  sea.  Then 
I  discovered  the  tragic  poets.  Sophocles,  Euri- 
pides, opened  to  me  the  enchanted  world  of 
heroes,  initiated  me  into  the  poetry  of  woe.  At 
each  tragedy  that  I  read,  there  were  new  joys, 
tears  and  ecstasies  unknown  till  then. 

"Alcestis  and  Antigone  gave  me  the  noblest 
dreams  that  ever  boy  did  dream.  Bent  over 
my  dictionary,  above  my  ink-bespattered  desk, 


18 

I  would  see  divine  figures,  arms  of  ivory  droop- 
ing over  white  tunics,  and  hear  voices  sweeter 
than  the  sweetest  music,  lamenting  in  har- 
mony." 

So  Anatole  France  found  in  a  Jesuit  college 
the  Greek  beauty,  the  vision  of  life  which  he 
gives  back  to  us,  the  qualitative  ideal  still  dom- 
inant in  the  many-textured  web  of  his  world-old 
culture.  That  ideal,  the  symmetria  prisca,  he 
never  ceased  to  cultivate,  to  worship:  his  fa- 
vorite poets  are  still  the  poets  of  the  pagan 
world.  And  no  lover  of  his  well-nigh  perfect 
prose,  candid  and  full  of  charm  as  only  a  Gre- 
cian could  create,  but  will  exclaim,  as  he  does 
in  one  of  his  early  novels :  "O  Athens,  city  ever 
to  be  revered,  if  thou  hadst  never  existed,  the 
world  would  not  yet  know  what  beauty  is !" 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  YOUTH  AND  THE  PARNASSIAN. 


II 


APPLE  or  quince,  the  fruit  to  come  is  shown 
Lby  April's  leaves  or  flowers.  So  we  have 
quoted  rather  largely  from  Le  Livre  de  mon 
ami,  that  delightful  autobiography  of  Anatole 
France.  Read  the  book,  if  you  would  see  how 
a  genius  unfolds !  After  childhood  comes  ado- 
lescence, and  an  account  of  a  first  love  turned 
into  tragedy  by  his  fatal  reply  to  his  lady,  "Oui, 
monsieur."  Racked  with  self-recrimination, 
inept  and  stupid,  the  self-conscious  boy  is  sent 
off  on  his  vacation.  He  discovers  the  sea,  the 
mysterious  ocean  which  everywhere  and  for 
every  humanist,  still  beats  with  *'the  surge  and 
thunder  of  the  Odyssey";  he  dreams  away  a 
summer  filled  with  vague  desires;  and  by  the 
sea,  on  the  cliffs  alone  with  his  pocket  Virgil, 
he  finds  at  last  the  secret  of  his  trouble  in  the 
love-story  of  the  hapless  Carthaginian  queen. 
Yet  sensitive  as  he  was,  the  fate  of  Dido  was 
not  to  be  his.    He  returned  to  Paris  for  his  last 


22 

year  at  Stanislas :  "he  was  very  unhappy  and  he 
passed  his  examinations."  Of  course  this  was 
to  be  expected ;  even  then,  his  is  a  mind  too  in- 
telligent to  yield  entirely  to  feeling.  Timid  in 
manners,  he  was  already  bold  in  thought,  inde- 
pendent, an  intellectuel  despite  the  distractions 
of  a  temperament  distinctly  artistic.  But  he 
had  a  friend  to  help  him,  a  fellow-student,  after- 
ward distinguished  for  the  science  he  brought 
to  the  study  of  autographs.  Etienne  Charavay 
was  just  the  mentor  to  instil  in  him  the  love  of 
erudition  needed  in  a  true  historical  vision. 

Best  of  all,  his  development  was  not  hurried. 
It  was  given  him  to  ripen  slowly.  He  was  to 
pass  "many  happy  years,  without  writing,  lead- 
ing a  contemplative  and  solitary  life."  Some 
teaching  and  a  little  desultory  journalism  fell 
to  his  lot;  but  through  it  all  he  had  leisure  to 
read,  to  dream,  to  think.  Little  by  little,  school 
and  university  were  replaced  by  other  teachers, 
and  the  soul  of  the  boy  became  the  mirror  of  a 
skeptic's  world. 

"O  sordid  old  Jews,  candid  booksellers  of  the 
quays,  my  masters,  what  gratitude  I  owe  you ! 
More  than  the  professors  of  the  University, 
you  gave  me  my  intellectual  education.  You 
spread  before  my  delighted  eyes  the  mysterious 
forms  of  a  past  life,  and  every  sort  of  precious 


23 

monument  of  the  thought  of  man.  'Twas  by 
ferreting  in  your  book-boxes,  by  contemplating 
your  dusty  stores,  laden  with  the  wretched  rel- 
ics of  our  fathers  and  with  their  beautiful 
thoughts,  that  imperceptibly  I  absorbed  the 
sanest  philosophy. 

"Yes,  my  friends,  'twas  by  reading  the  worm- 
eaten  books  that  you  sold  for  a  living,  that  I 
acquired,  boy  that  I  was,  a  profound  conscious- 
ness of  the  passing  of  things  and  the  nothing- 
ness of  it  all.  I  divined  that  men  were  but 
changing  images  in  the  universal  illusion,  and 
from  that  day  I  was  inclined  to  sadness,  gentle- 
ness, and  pity." 

This  was  the  youth  of  twenty-three  who  in 
1867  was  admitted  to  the  noisy  sessions  of  the 
Parnassian  poets.  They  met  in  the  book-shop 
of  their  publisher  Lemerre,  to  hear  Leconte  de 
Lisle  expound  the  theories  of  a  new  poetic  art. 
Romantic  lyrists  had  failed  through  abuse  of 
self-confession,  so  the  Parnassians  renounced 
them  all  save  the  more  objective  Vigny,  Gau- 
tier,  and  Baudelaire.  Self-repression — the  sym- 
bol of  Vigny's  La  mort  du  loup — was  the  new 
ideal ;  and  Gautier  and  Baudelaire  had  revealed 
the  plastic,  picturesque,  almost  metallic  style 
which  alone  could  fittingly  clothe  their  imper- 
sonal vision  of  the  world.     Thus,  out  of  ro- 


24 

manticisni,  arose  a  new  poetic  theory,  and  as 
the  master  had  now  pubhshed  Les  Poemes  bar- 
bares  as  well  as  Les  Poemes  antiques,  the  word 
had  twice  become  flesh.  Splendid,  barbaric, 
passionately  impassive,  a  new  lyric  realism  was 
born,  vivid  as  the  prose  of  Salammbo  and  La 
Tentation  de  Saint- Ant oine. 

Realism  was  now  the  dominant  mood  of  art. 
It  was  the  child  of  science,  this  rejection  of  the 
personal  element  in  literature; — child  of  the 
great  scientific  movement  which  swept  over  Eu- 
rope just  after  the  middle  of  the  century.  Dar- 
win's Origin  of  Species,  translated  in  1862,  had 
been  followed  in  France  by  Claude  Bernard's 
.Philosophie  ex  per  intent  ale.  Darwinism  and  de- 
terminism became  the  watchwords  of  that  gen- 
eration. Had  not  Taine  just  published  the 
preface  of  his  English  Literature,  reducing 
genius  itself  to  the  product  of  the  race,  the 
milieu,  and  the  moment?  What  wonder  then 
that  the  new  poetry  should  reflect  the  natural- 
ism which  had  spread  from  philosophy  to  art? 

Poetry,  however,  must  discover  an  esthetic 
basis  for  determinism.  Hence  it  was  that  Le- 
conte  de  Lisle  turned  to  India,  to  find  in  the 
philosophy  of  the  Hindus  the  secret  of  a  fatal- 
ism at  once  scientific  and  fervidly  religious. 
If  science  had  done  away  with  a  personal  God, 


25 

the  poet  might  still  invoke  Maya  and  find  con- 
solation : 

"L'invisible  Maya,  creatrice  du  monde, 
Espoir  et  souvenir,  le  reve  et  la  raison, 
L'unique,  reternelle  et  la  sainte  Illusion."^ 

So,  after  the  author  of  Poemes  antiques,  x\na- 
tole  France  espoused  Illusion  in  his  turn.  Like 
his  master,  he  gilds  agnosticism  with  poetry, 
looking  less  to  India  than  to  the  skepticism  of 
Greek  philosophy.  Not  even  a  subjective  nature 
escapes  the  influence  of  the  age. 

Six  years  were  to  pass  before  his  first  verses 
grew  into  a  book,  the  slender  volume  called 
Les  Poemes  dores.  Before  1873  we  have  only 
scattered  verse,  appearing  for  the  most  part  in 
ephemeral  reviews.  There  was,  for  instance, 
La  Gazette  riinee,  published  by  Lemerre  in  sup- 
port of  the  new  school.  Anatole  France  collab- 
orated on  this  together  with  Paul  Verlaine. 
Two  poems,  not  deemed  worthy  of  inclusion  in 
the  volume,  had  appeared  in  June,  1867,  Denys 
de  Syracuse  and  Les  legions  de  Varus;  and 
their  manifest  political  allusions  probably  had 
some  part  in  the  suppression  of  the  young  re- 

^(No  merit  of  literal  accuracy  or  literary  beauty  is  claimed 
for  the  versions  given  in  these  footnotes :  Traduttore,  tradi- 
tore.) 

"Goddess  invisible,  that  made  the  world, 
Hope,  memory,  our  reason  and  our  dream. 
Illusion,  single,  everlasting,  holy." 


26 

view.  He  had  also  contributed  to  another  little 
periodical,  Le  Chasseur  hihliographe,  becoming 
its  editor  that  same  year.  Bibliographical  ar- 
ticles written  jointly  with  his  father,  bits  of 
dramatic  criticism  of  his  own,  fantasies  in  prose 
— such  were  his  contributions  to  this  review; 
among  them  we  find,  however,  a  pagan-Chris- 
tian poem  of  the  Alexandrian  age: 

"En  ce  temps-14  vivait  une  femme  au  pays 
Des  Egyptiens,  belle,  et  qu'on  nommait  Thais "* 

Anatole  France  was  now  a  Parnassian  in  the 
bud,  slowly  preparing  his  first  volume  of  poems. 
And  as  a  Parnassian,  interested  in  their  great 
precursor,  it  was  not  fortuitous  that  literary 
piety  should  have  led  him  at  the  same  time  to 
undertake  a  serious  study  of  Alfred  de  Vigny. 
Published  in  1868,  this  pledge  to  scholarship 
offsets  his  devotion  to  the  muse.  But  when, 
two  years  later,  the  war  broke  out  between 
France  and  Germany,  it  was  still  his  pocket 
Virgil  which  he  carried  with  him  to  the  front; 
and  he  tells  us  later'  how  he  and  a  comrade  sat 
reading  it  during  the  attack  on  La  Faisanderie, 
while  the  cannon-balls  fell  hissing  into  the 
Marne. 

*  "In  those  days  lived  a  woman  fair 
In  Egypt :  Thais  was  her  name. ..." 

»  Vie  Kttiraire,  II,  309. 


27 

Les  Poemes  dores  finally  appeared  in  1873. 
Great  poetry  it  is  not,  but  it  is  fine  verse, 
wrought  as  carefully  as  an  etching,  and  deli- 
cately luminous  as  its  title  suggests.  Indeed, 
the  first  poem  gives  the  key-note  to  the  volume, 
a  sunny  neo-Greek  pantheism,  serenely  fatalis- 
tic, the  Epicureanism  of  Renan  cast  into  the 
verse  form  of  Theophile  Gautier. 

"Sois  ma  force,  6  Lumiere !  et  puissent  mes  pensees, 
Belles  et  simples  comme  toi, 
Dans  la  grace  et  la  paix,  derouler  sous  ta  foi 
Leurs  formes  toujours  cadencees ! 

"Donne  a  mes  yeux  heureux  de  voir  longtemps  encor 
En  une  volupte  sereine, 

La  Beaute  se  dressant  marcher  comme  une  reine 
Sous  ta  chaste  couronne  d'or. 

"Et  lorsque  dans  son  sein  la  Nature  des  choses 
Formera  mes  destins  futurs, 

Reviens  baigner,  reviens  nourrir  de  tes  flots  purs 
Mes  nouvelles  metamorphoses."* 

*  "Oh  Light,  be  thou  my  strength !    May  thoughts  like  thee 
Simple  and  fair, 

Reveal  to  me  thy  grace,  thy  peace — declare 
Thy  limpid  melody. 

"Oh  Light !    Long  let  these  blessed  eyes  behold 
— Thrilled,  but  serene — 
Beauty  arise,  and  bearing  like  a  queen 
Thy  virgin  crown  of  gold. 

"And  when  Old  Nature  to  her  breast  receives 
This  dust,  to  form 

New  lives  therefrom,  come  back,  come  back  and  warm 
Mv  flowers  and  leaves !" 


28 

Thus  does  poetry  transform  the  cold  truths 
of  science.  Darwin  only  awakens  a  forgotten 
pantheism,  and  Anatole  France,  like  Swinburne 
just  across  the  Channel,  celebrates  in  the  ful- 
ness of  youth  a  pagan  hymn  to  life.  Vowed  to 
impersonality  by  his  master's  example,  the 
young  veteran  of  '70  sings  of  war  only  as  the 
eternal  conflict  in  the  animal  world;  and  the 
fate  of  the  dying  stag  or  dragon-fly,  like  the 
dim  instinct  of  trees  or  the  longing  of  flower 
for  flower,  is  but  a  note  in  the  larger  song  of 
life,  life  and  that  eternal  Eros  which  for  Dar- 
win as  for  Epicurus  long  ago,  builds  without 
ceasing  this  world  of  fact  or  dream. 

"L' Amour,  I'Amour  puissant,  la  Volupte  feconde, 
Voila  le  dieu  qui  cree  incessamment  le  monde, 

Le  pere  de  la  vie  et  des  destins  futurs ! 

C'est  par  I'Amour  fatal,  par  ses  luttes  cruelles, 
Que  I'univers  s'anime  en  des  formes  plus  belles, 
S'acheve  et  se  connait  en  des  esprits  plus  purs."' 

The  volume  was  dedicated  to  Leconte  de 
Lisle.  One  may  trace  the  disciple  here  and 
there — in  the  coloring  of  Homa'i  and  in  that 

^  "  'Tis  Lx>ve  the  god,  and  Love's  delight 
That  builds  the  world  incessantly, 
— Father  of  Life,  and  Destiny — . 
All  Beauty  owns  his  secret  might; 
Grows  the  world  fairer  in  our  sight? 
Completer,  richer,  conscious  of 
Itself  in  clearer  minds  ? — Praise  Love 
And  all  his  conflicts  infinite." 


29 

vivid  picture  of  the  Deluge,  La  Ulle  de  Cain, 
yet  nowhere  will  be  found  the  midday  glory  of 
Poemes  harhares,  splendidly  oriental  as  a  scimi- 
tar glittering  in  the  sun.  In  the  lesser  poet  the 
richness  of  the  oil-painting  fades  to  the  delicacy 
of  water-color.  Nor  does  the  disciple  catch  the 
austere  religious  fervor  of  Les  Poemes  an- 
tiques. No  Buddhistic  renunciation  gives  lyric 
fire  to  these  verses,  wholly  Greek  in  their  sane 
and  smiling  paganism.  Even  the  thought  of 
death  inspires  only  a  deeper  love  of  life,  as  may 
be  seen  in  La  Mort: 

"Si  la  vierge  vers  toi  jette  sous  les  ramures 
Le  rire  par  sa  mere  a  ses  levres  appris ; 
Si,  tiede  dans  son  corps  dont  elle  sait  le  prix, 
Le  desir  a  gonfle  ses  formes  demi-mures; 

"Le  soir,  dans  la  foret,  pleine  de  frais  murmures, 
Si,  meditant  d'unir  vos  chairs  et  vos  esprits, 
Vous  melez,  de  sang  jeune  et  de  baisers  fleuris, 
Vos  levres,  en  jouant,  teintes  du  sue  des  mures, 

"Si  le  besoin  d'aimer  vous  caresse  et  vous  mord, 
Amants,  c'est  que  deja  plane  sur  vous  la  mort: 

Son  aiguillon  fait  seul  d'un  couple  un  dieu  qui  cree. 

"Le  sein  d'un  immortel  ne  saurait  s'embraser. 
Louez,  vierges,  amants,  louez  la  Mort  sacree, 
Puisque  vous  lui  devez  I'ivresse  du  baiser."^ 

^  "If  a  maid  mocks  you,  laughing  in  the  way 

Her  mother  taught — or  runs  beneath  the  trees ; 
If  in  her  bosom's  budding  ecstasies 
Desire  bums,  although  she  murmurs  nay: 


30 

Life  and  love  and  death,  and  all  the  mystery 
of  beauty  in  this  flood  of  appearances  which  is 
the  world  —  bits  of  sunny  landscape,  forest 
nooks,  nocturnes  or  marines  delicate  as  an 
aquarelle  —  such  is  the  fabric  of  his  verse. 
Slighter  and  less  vivid,  his  pictures  often  recall 
Gautier's : 

"Ruines  d'un  temple  ou  des  lyres 
Pendent  a  des  chevilles  d'or, 
Ou  des  pieds  de  nymphes  encor 
Dansent  en  de  joyeux  delires, 

"Muette,  la  maison  des  Rois 
Est  assise  comme  une  veuve, 
Sur  la  rive  droite  du  fleuve, 
Sous  les  nymphees  blancs  et  froids.'"^ 

Books,  too,  are  his  inspiration.  History  and 
legend  give  us  poems  like  La  danse  des  niorts 
and  Le  Venusherg.  Sur  une  signature  de  Marie 
Stuart,  dedicated  to  Charavay  and  suggestive 

"If  the  cool  whispering  woods,  the  evening  breeze, 
Lure  flesh  to  flesh  and  soul  to  soul  bewray. 
And  young  blood's  ardor  joins  in  amorous  play 
Your  red  lips  redder  yet  with  mulberries : 

"Oh  lovers !    If  love's  longing  holds  you  thrall, 
'Tis  the  Dark  Angel's  wing  that  trails  above, 
She  that  alone  creates,  has  made  you  gods ! 

"Immortal  hearts  would  ever  be  as  clods. 
So  praise  ye  Death,  maidens  and  lovers  all. 
To  whom  ye  owe  the  rapturous  kiss  of  Lovel" 

'  "Ruins  of  a  fane,  where  lyres 
Hang  on  carven  pegs  of  gold, 


31 

of  long  evenings  spent  over  his  portfolio  of 
autographs,  reveals  a  deep  sense  of  the  romance 
of  history.  But  it  was  three  years  after  this, 
when  Anatole  France  had  emerged  from  his 
twenties  and  settled  down  in  his  library,  like 
Bonnard,  that  he  turned  to  the  past  and  drew 
from  it  the  exquisite  story  of  Les  Noces  corin- 
thiennes. 

Les  Noces  corinthiennes  is  a  dream  of  Greece 
set  to  the  music  of  Racine.  Finer  than  his  ear- 
lier sketches,  because  a  larger  composition, 
more  lyric  because  of  his  feeling  for  the  period, 
this  little  drama  in  Alexandrines  is  not  merely 
a  poet's  monument  to  the  land  which  had  re- 
vealed to  him  the  vision  of  beauty ;  it  is  his  first 
historical  miniature,  delicately  etched  as  Thais. 
The  very  spirit  of  Hellas — so  far  as  we  mod- 
erns can  divine  it — inspires  him:  the  candor 
of  Homer,  the  lyricism  of  Theocritus,  the  mel- 
ody and  pathos  of  Euripides.  Here  is  presented 
the  Greek  view  of  life,  calm  and  sane  and  un- 
disturbed by  any  sense  of  the  infinite  beyond: 

" La  vie  est  bonne, 

Car  c'est  un  grand  Demon,  ami,  qui  nous  la  donne. 

Where  the  wood-nymphs,  as  of  old. 
Dance  in  gay  delirious  choirs ; 

"And  the  palace,  silent,  still 
As  a  widow  in  her  weeds, 
Sits  among  the  river's  reeds, 
'Mid  the  marbles  cold  and  chill." 


32 

L'enfant  jette  en  jouant  les  osselets  et  rit, 

Le  jeune  homme  au  sang  vif  medite  en  son  esprit 

De  rencontrer,  le  soir,  la  vierge  sous  les  saules. 

Le  blanc  vieillard  dont  I'age  a  courbe  les  epaules, 

Assis  au  banc  du  seuil,  sous  les  astres  en  choeur 

A  parier  sagement  rejouit  son  cher  cceur. 

Au  long  des  jours  de  miel  et  des  heures  ameres, 

Suis  doucement  le  fil  que  te  tournent  les  Moeres. 

L'homme  aux  ardents  desirs,  quand  I'Hades  I'a  vaincu, 

A  desire  de  vivre  et  n'a  jamais  vecu. 

Craignons  les  vains  souhaits  et  I'attente  chagrine."^ 

Thus  Speaks  the  father  of  the  heroine  to  her 
lover  Hippias,  when  the  day  is  over  and  the 
vintage  done.  But  the  mother  of  Daphne  has 
a  different  dream  of  the  world:  Kallista  is  a 
Christian  convert,  burning  with  zeal  for  the 
new  faith,  austere  and  fervid  as  Polyeucte. 
Sick  of  an  unknown  malady  and  eager  to  secure 
life  and  health  for  good  works,  she  has  conse- 
crated her  unwilling  daughter  to  Christ,  in- 
voking God's  vengeance  upon  herself  if  Daphne 

*  "...  .Life's  good,  I  know, 

For  'tis  a  gift  some  spirit  doth  bestow. 
The  child  laughs  o'er  the  toys  he  throws  in  play, 
The  youth,  hot-blooded,  plans  at  close  of  day 
To  meet  the  maiden  underneath  the  trees. 
The  graybeard  with  his  shoulders  bent  and  old, 
Sits  by  the  threshold,  'neath  the  stars  of  gold. 
And  cheers  his  heart  with  wise  discourse,  at  ease. 
Oh  friend,  through  mornings  honey-sweet  or  bitter  eves, 
Follow  the  clue  the  fatal  Triad  weaves. 
He  who  desires  too  much,  if  death  befall, 
Has  hoped  to  live  and  never  lived  at  all. 
Avoid  delays  that  vex  and  vain  desires." 


33 

fail  to  pay  the  vow.  So,  while  the  nuptial  chorus 
sings  "Hymen  O  Hymensee,"  the  girl  waves 
back  the  merry-makers  and  casts  her  ring  into 
the  fountain  of  the  nymphs: 

"Rejouis-toi,  Dieu  triste  a  qui  plait  la  souflfrance !" 

But  the  maiden's  suffering  has  only  begun. 
Hippias  returns  from  his  voyage  to  wed,  and 
Daphne,  leaving  her  seclusion  to  pay  a  last 
midnight  visit  to  the  house  of  her  childhood, 
finds  her  lover  sleeping  on  a  lion's  skin  in  the 
hall.  He  wakes,  and  pleads  with  her  until  her 
heart  belies  her  promise : 

Daphne : 
Ouvre  au  ciel  tes  ailes  de  colombe; 
Viens,  Esprit,  verse-moi  ta  force !    Je  succombe. 

Hippias : 
Vois,  il  est  doux  d'aimer. 

Daphne : 

Je  t'aime  malgre  moi. 

Hippias : 
C'est  Eros  qui  le  veut :  il  faut  suivre  sa  loi. 

Then  the  law  of  Eros  becomes  the  law  of 
tragic  fatality.  Kallista  intervenes,  but  Daphne 
meets  her  lover  in  a  pagan  tomb.  'They  at  least 


34 

have  loved,  and  their  ashes  are  content."  There 
she  prepares  the  poison  obtained  from  the  old 
witch,  mingles  it  with  the  sacrificial  wine  of  the 
wedding-feast,  and,  resolved  to  betray  neither 
God  nor  her  lover,  dies  a  martyr  to  love,  a 
Greek  Atala. 

This  is  in  brief  the  plot  of  Les  Noces  corin- 
thiennes.  It  is  the  story  of  the  Bride  of  Corinth, 
adapted  by  Goethe  from  an  old  tradition.  But 
finer  than  Goethe's  delineation  is  the  picture 
drawn  by  Anatole  France,  and  only  the  fact 
that  it  is  a  picture,  a  fresco,  not  to  be  dismem- 
bered with  impunity,  stays  us  from  quoting  the 
verses  of  Daphne's  farewell,  her  lament  for  life 
and  love  and  her  shattered  dreams  of  mother- 
hood : 

"Et  pourtant  je  vivrais  si  Dieu  I'avait  voulu." 

Nor  could  the  art  of  the  story  be  shown  by 
a  single  page.  Scene  by  scene  the  poem  unrolls, 
and  vintagers  or  wedding-guests  or  chanting 
converts  provide  the  choruses  which  frame  each 
separate  scene.  The  pagan  ideal  finds  its  foil 
in  the  zeal  of  the  early  Christians,  as  in  the 
author  the  love  of  saintly  legend  and  the  love 
of  Greek  beauty:  and  the  reader  sees  how  the 
dreams  of  his  childhood,  the  Bible  stories  read 
at  his  mother's  knee,  made  it  easy  for  him  to 


35 

relive  the  age  of  faith  he  describes.  In  the 
Preface  is  found  his  real  attitude:  he  knows 
"there  is  nothing  certain  outside  the  realm  of 
science,"  but  he  also  knows  how  unscientific  it 
is  to  think  with  Renan  that  science  can  replace 
religion.  "As  long  as  man  is  suckled  at  a 
woman's  breast,  he  will  be  consecrated  in  the 
temple  and  initiated  into  some  mystery  of  the 
divine.  He  will  have  his  dream.  And  what 
matter  if  the  dream  be  false,  provided  it  is  fair  ? 
Is  it  not  the  destiny  of  man  to  be  sunk  in  an 
everlasting  illusion?  And  is  not  this  illusion 
the  very  condition  of  life  ?" 

Such  a  declaration  might  well  be  taken  as 
prophetic.  But  equally  significant,  and  charm- 
ingly autobiographical  are  the  lines  from  an- 
other poem  of  this  volume,  L'auteur  a  un  ami : 

"Fatigues  vers  le  soir  de  la  plume  et  du  livre, 
Dans  le  proche  jardin  nous  errons  bien  souvent, 
Toujours  surpris  de  vivre  et  de  regarder  vivre, 
Nous  jetons  de  vains  mots  emportes  par  le  vent."" 

Even  the  Luxembourg  Gardens  may  yield 
the  poet's  sense  of  wonder — wonder  dissolved 
into  skepticism  by  the  acid  of  thought.     Of 

•  "Weary  of  book  and  pen,  at  close  of  day, 
In  the  old  park  we  stroll  and  talk  at  ease : 
Surprised  to  be  alive,  to  watch  life's  play. 
We  cast  our  vain  thoughts  to  the  evening  breeze." 


36 

course,  pessimism  was  then  a  literary  mode — 
or  is  it  the  verse  which  in  the  final  line  calls  for 
those  vibrant  labials?  However  that  be,  no 
words  are  vain,  if  only  they  are  spoken  by  a 
poet,  and  some  earlier  lines,  addressed  to  Theo- 
phile  Gautier,  reveal  this  skeptic's  real  appre- 
ciation of  the  hidden  might  of  words : 

"La  parole  est  divine  et  contient  toutes  choses. 
Heureux  qui,  pour  fixer  son  reve  interieur, 
Employa  sans  faillir  la  forme  et  la  lueur 
Dans  le  cristal  des  sons  fatalement  encloses  !"io 

And  he  goes  on  to  show  how  words,  in  their 
magic,  are  the  poet's  immortality.  Like  Gau- 
tier, the  poet  survives  in  the  survival  of  art. 
His  dreams  remain,  and  "break  for  us  the 
bonds  of  space  and  time."  In  the  absence  of 
ultimate  ends,  we  have  at  least  art :  art  and  the 
gift  of  living  in  the  mind.  For  it  is  not  merely 
the  poet,  it  is  the  critic,  the  future  dilettante, 
the  disciple  of  Renan  who  concludes : 

"Que  pour  nous  I'univers  se  baigne  tout  entier 
Des  effluves  charmants  de  la  pensee  humaine!"J^i 


10 "Speech  is  divine  and  holds  the  world  in  fee. 
Fortunate  he,  who  used  to  fix  his  dream 
Impeccably  the  magic  line  or  gleam 
Locked  in  sound's  crystalline  by  destiny!" 

11  "Oh  sparkling  stream  of  thought,  immerse 
In  beauty  all  the  universe !" 


CHAPTER  III. 


FROM  NATURALIST  TO   SKEPTIC:    SYLVESTRE 
BONNARD    (1879-82). 


Ill 


To  begin  with  a  book  of  verse  is  not  rare 
among  French  writers,  trained  in  classical 
metrics  at  school.  After  Euterpe  comes  the 
pedestrian  Muse,  all  the  richer  for  the  secrets 
of  color  and  rhythm,  learned  from  an  earlier 
love.  Maupassant,  Bourget,  Daudet,  and  Riche- 
pin  began  as  poets;  Maeterlinck  and  Rostand 
wrote  lyrics  before  they  took  up  the  drama. 
But  this  singing  season,  usually  ended^  by 
twenty-five,  lasted  much  longer  in  the  case  of 
Anatole  France;  his  first  volume  of  verse  ap- 
peared at  twenty-nine.  Six  years  more  were  to 
pass  before  his  first  novel — years  of  mingled 
poetry  and  scholarship  and  literary  journal- 
ism. He  was  still  seeking  his  way  in  life,  and 
fate  generously  gave  him  time  to  choose. 

In  1874  we  find  him  on  the  stafif  of  the  Senate 
Library.  But  he  soon  resigned,  too  much  of 
an  artist  to  endure  the  deadly  routine  and  petty 
tyranny  of  bureaucracy.     The  situation  was 


40 

curious,  for  his  immediate  superior  here  was 
the  under-librarian  Leconte  de  Lisle.  Master 
and  disciple  had  grown  apart  since  the  days  of 
the  dedication ;  an  indocile  Parnassian,  Anatole 
France  had  provoked  the  leader's  disdain.  Now 
the  younger  poet  found  himself  in  the  lion's 
mouth,  and  he  was  soon  reduced  to  the  position 
of  a  mere  scribe.  From  this  adventure  sprang 
the  article  published  in  Le  Temps  when  Leconte 
de  Lisle  was  elected  to  the  Academy,  a  criticism 
just  and  fair  enough,  but  which  provoked  a 
public  retort. 

At  any  rate,  Anatole  France  bade  farewell  to 
the  desk  and  the  card-catalogue.  He  returned 
to  literature,  finding  a  poet's  joy  in  exploring 
the  lives  and  works  of  the  poets  he  loved.  His 
study  of  Alfred  de  Vigny,  already  published 
(1868),  had  won  a  modest  success,  and  this 
soon  brought  a  number  of  commissions  from 
his  publisher.  Lemerre  wished  him  to  write 
biographical  introductions  for  a  series  of  French 
classics:  editions  of  Racine,  Moliere,  La  Fon- 
taine, books  like  Paul  et  Virginie,  Manon  Les- 
caut,  Le  Viable  hoiteux,  and  L'Heptameron. 
He  began  in  1874  with  Racine,  and  in  the  next 
ten  years  completed  fourteen  similar  studies, 
which  have  now  been  collected  in  the  volume 
entitled  Genie  latin.    Besides  these,  Charavay 


41 

printed  three  little  monographs:  Jules  Breton, 
Racine  et  Nicole,  and  Bernardin  de  Saint- 
Pierre. 

It  was  Lemerre  who  had  published  his  verse. 
The  publisher  of  the  Parnassians  did  not  fail 
to  see  the  advantage  his  firm  might  gain  from 
such  an  intellect,  so  he  called  the  editor  of  his 
French  classics  into  the  sanctum  as  reader,  This 
was  really  an  anonymous  debut  in  contempo- 
rary criticism;  but  Anatole  France  knew  that 
such  work  could  never  advance  him,  and  he 
soon  turned  his  long-'prenticed  hand  to  the 
novel.  Besides  his  study  of  Lucile  de  Chateau- 
briand, 1879  brought  two  essays  in  fiction, 
Jocaste  and  Le  Chat  maigre. 

Both  stories  are  disappointing  in  the  light  of 
his  later  books.  But  they  mark  a  phase  in  the 
author's  evolution;  they  show  us  a  poet 
shrunken  into  a  naturalistic  novelist  by  the 
scientific  spirit  of  his  age.  Beside  Sylvestre 
Bonnard,  their  characters  seem  forced,  unnat- 
ural, mere  puppets  moved  by  a  mechanistic 
philosophy.  It  is  the  formula  of  the  determin- 
istic novel  which  gives  us  the  pretty  epileptic 
heroine  of  Jocaste,  who  loves  a  young  man  and 
lets  herself  be  married  to  an  old  one ;  and  it  is 
the  suggestivism  of  modern  medicine  which 
dictates  the  climax,  when  the  Greek  story  of 


42 

Jocasta  inspires  to  suicide  the  girl  whose  guilty 
love  and  lack  of  will  allows  her  husband  to  be 
poisoned.  Now  the  reader  is  reminded  of  Dau- 
det,  and  now  of  Emma  Bovary;  the  heroine 
and  her  father  are  both  reflections  of  Flaubert. 
But  the  lover,  the  ironic  young  doctor,  fore- 
shadows in  his  materialism  Doctor  Trublet  of 
Histoire  comique;  he  too  finds  in  nature  "the 
scene  of  an  everlasting  slaughter,"  and  his 
bleak  determinism  shows  us  the  reaction  of  the 
age  upon  the  youthful  Anatole  France. 

Le  Chat  maigre  is  more  sympathetic,  al- 
though even  weaker  in  its  construction.  It 
hardly  owns  a  plot,  this  story  of  the  indolent 
mulatto  who,  brought  to  Paris  for  an  education, 
drifts  through  all  the  gutters  of  artistic  Bo- 
hemia. A  love-story,  direct  and  primitive  as 
its  half-savage  hero,  is  added  for  the  sake  of 
climax,  but  the  book  is  at  best  only  a  gallery 
of  portraits:  the  scheming  failure  Godet;  La- 
banne  the  scholar-sculptor,  who,  like  Pellerin 
in  L'Education  sentimentale,  digests  libraries 
instead  of  modeling;  Branchut,  the  genius 
whose  failure  is  due  to  the  fact  that  he  has 
"two  grains  of  phosphorus  in  his  brain  instead 
of  one"!  "Le  Chat  Maigre,"  a  tavern  where 
the  Bohemians  meet  to  dine  and  discuss  art  and 
found  literary  journals,  is  probably  a  remi- 


43 

niscent  caricature  of  some  Parnassian  haunt 
frequented  by  the  author,  while  the  whole  novel 
very  likely  reflects  his  first  curious  exploration 
of  Bohemian  Paris,  with  its  studios  and  its 
cafes. 

Thus  the  story  is  a  bit  more  sympathetic  than 
Jocaste.  For  this  another  model  than  Daudet 
is  perhaps  responsible.  France  admired  Dick- 
ens, and  in  L^  Chat  maigre  he  found  a  milieu 
where  the  naturalistic  formula  might  be  worked 
out  with  figures  both  picturesque  and  quaint, 
figures  not  wholly  unlikable.  Still  he  remains 
to  the  end  a  spectator  of  life  and  an  aristocrat ; 
he  tells  us  that  "democracy  can  never  produce 
an  art";  and  carrying  to  the  logical  end  his 
skepticism,  he  makes  one  speaker  say  that  every 
artistic  masterpiece  is  "a  dangerous  illusion 
and  a  culpable  fraud." 

The  blight  of  naturalism,  evidently,  could 
scarcely  strike  deeper.  But  we  have  not  yet 
done  with  its  traces  on  Anatole  France.  In 
1882,  one  year  after  Sylvestre  Bonnard,  ap- 
peared Les  Desirs  de  Jean  Servien,  so  different 
in  its  ethical  attitude  and  manner  that  it  prob- 
ably was  written  first.  For  the  philosophy  of 
the  genial  old  scholar  is  flatly  contradicted  by 
this  dreary  fatalistic  account  of  a  boy's  long 
disillusion,  true  to  the  formula  of  naturalism 


44 

in  spite  of  all  the  personal  experience  which 
it  so  coldly  veils.  It  is  vain  for  youth  to  plan 
an  entire  devotion  to  thought,  vain  to  arrange 
a  program  of  life  amid  the  storms  of  adoles- 
cence. Vere  concordant  amoves,  and  even  the 
student  is  apt  to  yield  to  that  imperious  call. 
We  need  not  ask  what  illusion  lay  behind  this 
story  of  a  child  of  the  people,  cursed  by  gifts 
of  feeling  and  imagination,  over-educated  and 
weak,  whose  final  ruin  hangs  on  his  love  for  an 
actress  idealized  in  a  Sophoclean  role.  It  is 
the  dreams  of  the  poets  which  destroy  Jean 
Servien,  as  they  destroyed  Emma  Bovary :  but 
the  boy  is  first  spoiled  by  a  culture  far  beyond 
his  condition  in  life,  following  the  dying  wish 
of  a  mother  convinced  that  "education  alone 
opens  every  door." 

The  naturalistic  formula  changes  all  this  to 
tragic  irony.  "It  is  the  education  I  gave  him 
which  turned  him  away  from  practical  life," 
says  the  grief-stricken  father.  "It  was  school 
which  made  him  fall  in  love  with  an  actress." 
That  is  the  moral  of  the  story,  delivered  after 
Jean  has  failed  in  everything — when  the  boy 
who  promised  so  much,  weak-willed  and  re- 
pulsed by  life  at  every  turn,  has  perished  in  the 
riots  of  the  Commune.  The  aristocratic  stand- 
point is  seen  in  this  overemphasis  of  determin- 


45 

ism,  never  tired  of  contrasting  Jean  with  a 
father  content  to  remain  in  his  class,  or  with 
the  skeptical,  bourgeoise  old  aunt,  so  distrust- 
ful of  books.  It  might  seem  that  the  author 
felt  the  dangers  of  his  own  character,  and  re- 
acted against  the  idea  of  a  culture  which  de- 
velops the  mind  and  neglects  the  will.  Or  does 
he  really  express  himself  through  the  lips  of 
Jean's  tutor  Tudesco,  that  earlier,  viler  Jerome 
Coignard,  who  sings  the  charms  of  literature 
and  defends  the  independence  of  the  sage,  who 
"refuses  to  sacrifice  to  the  opinion  of  men  a 
single  one  of  his  desires"  ? 

For  the  biographer  of  Anatole  France,  Jean 
Servien  represents  the  dreams  of  his  adoles- 
cence, transposed  into  low  surroundings  such 
as  the  literary  mode  required.  This  is  plain 
by  a  comparison  with  the  latter  part  of  Le 
Livre  de  mon  ami.  Jean  is  the  adolescent  Ana- 
tole, transmogrified  by  the  dark-green  goggles 
of  naturalism,  and  his  objective  confession  is 
undoubtedly  earlier  than  Le  Crime  de  Syhestre 
Bonnard — that  idyl  of  the  indulgent  ataraxy  of 
the  sage. 

Thus  Anatole  France  passed  through  nat- 
uralism in  fiction,  as  he  had  passed  through  the 
Parnassian  school  in  his  verse.  The  true  lit- 
erary artist,  the  lover  of  books  as  well  as  life, 


46 

must  begin  by  imitations.  They  are  the  five- 
finger  exercises  of  his  art,  necessary,  but  only 
the  toilsome  road  to  music.  What  is  less  orig- 
inal than  the  background — one  can  hardly  call 
it  a  plot — on  which  is  depicted  the  portrait  of 
Sylvestre  Bonnard?  Scholars  have  pointed 
out  the  sources  of  the  novel,  and  they  are  plain 
to  every  cultivated  reader;  but  all  that  is  for- 
gotten before  the  triumphant  individuality  of 
the  result.  Good  old  Bonnard  is  outwardly  a 
conventional  figure.  He  is  the  absent-minded 
professor  of  half  a  dozen  novels,  but  of  them 
all  he  is  the  one  we  should  like  to  know.  His 
philosophy  of  life,  his  humor,  his  irony,  his 
infinite  indulgence  and  humanity,  make  him 
unique;  like  Goethe  in  his  conversations  with 
Eckermann,  he  surveys  the  world  from  a  ram- 
part of  Olympian  calm.  To  create  such  a  figure 
and  not  let  him  fall  into  platitude,  to  make  him 
living  and  lovable,  was  at  least  original  enough 
to  merit  an  award  from  the  Academy. 

Le  Crime  de  Sylvestre  Bonnard  is  an  im- 
mense projection  of  the  artistic  imagination. 
It  is  a  dream  of  old  age  made  by  a  man  still 
young,  true  to  atmosphere  because  it  grew  out 
of  that  moment  of  languor  which,  in  the  shel- 
tered life  of  a  man  of  books,  marks  the  passing 
of  one's  first  youth  and  the  acceptance  of  middle 


47 

age  and  its  calmer  joys.  It  shows  us  Anatole 
France  in  his  full  maturity,  a  "Nestor  of  letters" 
who  has  attained  through  study  and  reflection 
the  supreme  wisdom  of  the  ages.  "Time  is 
gentle  only  to  those  who  take  it  gently,"  says 
his  hero — an  old  scholar  who  has  discovered  the 
secret  of  tranquillity  in  the  life  of  books.  In 
angello  cum  lihello,  no  dilettante  but  an  ardent 
medievalist,  he  surveys  the  world  of  Paris  from 
his  casement  above  the  river,  "in  the  most 
beautiful  spot  of  all  the  world."  Beneath  him 
he  sees  the  streets  which  he  trod  as  a  child,  a 
discoverer  no  less  than  Columbus,  a  discoverer 
of  Life ;  and  the  Seine  and  the  Sainte-Chapelle, 
the  Louvre  and  Notre-Dame — all  this  visible 
beauty  of  Old  Paris  with  its  jewels  of  carven 
stone,  has  become  a  part  of  his  life,  a  part  of 
himself,  imaged  within  him  in  a  thousand  re- 
flections of  thought  and  feeling.  "Without 
these  things  I  should  be  nothing,"  he  tells  us. 
"That  is  why  I  love  Paris  with  an  unbounded 
love." 

With  all  this  Bonnard  has  not  lost  his  hu- 
manity. In  the  winter  of  his  life  he  looks  out 
upon  the  world  with  pity  and  love,  and  finding 
that  it  holds  the  granddaughter  of  his  boyhood's 
sweetheart,  devotes  himself  to  her  happiness 
in  tender  piety  for  an  unforgotten  past.    "Cle- 


48 

mentine  is  dead  and  her  daughter  is  dead,"  he 
writes  in  his  journal  when  at  last  he  learns  the 
fate  of  his  lost  Beatrice :  "humanity  is  made  up 
almost  entirely  of  the  dead,  so  few  are  the  liv- 
ing compared  to  the  multitude  of  those  who 
have  lived.  Everything  passes,  since  you  and 
your  daughter  have  passed  beyond;  but  life  is 
immortal,  and  it  is  life  that  we  must  love  in  its 
ever-changing  forms." 

What  then  is  the  crime  imputed  to  this  sage, 
to  this  idealized  Renan,  who  sees  in  the  universe 
only  the  reflection  of  his  own  soul  ?  Merely  the 
abduction  of  the  girl  Jeanne,  who,  thanks  to  a 
rascally  guardian,  is  confined  in  a  boarding- 
school  where  she  is  constantly  ill-treated.  As 
Bonnard  is  unable  to  help  her,  through  his  re- 
fusal to  accept  the  advances  of  the  virginal 
directress  of  the  place,  the  candid  old  scholar 
simply  carries  her  oflF.  But  he  is  saved  from 
the  consequences  of  this  rash  action  by  the 
flight  of  the  shifty  lawyer,  and,  appointed  guar- 
dian in  his  stead,  lives  to  see  Jeanne  married 
and  to  provide  her  dowry  from  the  sale  of  a 
library  collected  through  self-denial  and  toil. 

Such  is  the  slender  plot  of  Le  Crime  de  Syl- 
vestre  Bonnard.  The  story  is  nothing:  our 
interest  is  in  the  portrait  which  it  frames.  All 
the  romance  of  the  intellectual  life  is  shed  upon 


49 

this  figure.  One  thinks  of  those  portraits  by 
Whistler  or  Manet,  set  against  a  background 
which  seems  materialized  from  the  soul  of  the 
model,  under  a  light  inevitable  as  fate  itself. 
Whether  in  Paris  or  in  the  provinces,  not  one 
false  note  disturbs  the  harmony  of  the  picture. 
The  peace  of  life's  Indian  summer  has  fallen 
upon  the  old  scholar ;  resigned  to  the  approach 
of  winter,  he  sits  cheerful  and  undisturbed,  in 
a  calm  filled  with  memories  and  thoughts  which, 
birdlike,  rise  and  circle  and  return  with  softly- 
flashing  wings. 

Quotation  alone  can  show  this  intimate  charm 
in  the  portrait.  Take  for  instance  the  reverie 
which  follows,  consigned  to  his  diary  after  his 
drive  through  the  moonlight  to  the  neglected 
chateau : 

"Night  reigns  in  noble  languor  over  men  and 
beasts,  freed  by  her  from  their  daily  yoke,  and 
I  am  sensible  to  her  benign  influence,  although 
now,  after  sixty  years  of  habit,  I  feel  things 
only  through  the  signs  which  represent  them 
For  me  the  world  has  nothing  left  but  words, 
so  long  have  I  studied  them !  Each  of  us  in  his 
own  way  dreams  his  dream  of  life.  Mine  I  have 
dreamed  in  my  library,  and  when  my  time  comes 
to  leave  this  world,  may  God  take  me  on  my 
step-ladder,  before  my  book-laden  shelves!" 


50 

Of  course,  this  is  the  "nox  eraf  of  Virgil. 
But  Virgil  only  strikes  the  first  chord:  it  is 
Sylvestre  Bonnard  who  develops  the  melody. 
Besides,  would  such  as  he  look  at  the  world 
through  other  than  classical  eyes?  Like  his 
creator,  old  Bonnard  is  a  Grecian:  despite  his 
medieval  studies,  the  book-shelf  next  his  hand 
is  filled  with  the  poets  of  antiquity.  He  under- 
stands the  classic  world,  and  when  Madame 
Trepof  rails  at  poor  barren  Sicily,  she  provokes 
an  outburst  which  her  butterfly  soul  is  hardly 
fitted  to  comprehend : 

"This  land  is  not  frightful,  Madame.  This 
land  is  a  land  of  glory.  Beauty  is  a  thing  so 
great  and  so  august,  that  centuries  of  barbarism 
cannot  so  blot  it  out  as  not  to  leave  something 
to  adore.  The  majesty  of  Demeter  of  old  still 
hovers  over  these  arid  hills,  and  the  Greek  muse, 
which  sent  its  notes  divine  echoing  over  the 
Arethusa  and  the  Menalus,  still  sings  to  my 
ear  on  the  denuded  mountain  or  in  the  dried-up 
spring.  Yes,  Madame,  in  earth's  last  days  when, 
lifeless  as  the  moon  to-day,  our  globe  shall  roll 
through  space  its  pallid  corpse,  the  soil  which 
bears  the  ruins  of  Selinonte  will  keep  through 
the  death  of  all  things  the  traces  of  its  beauty. 
And  then  there  will  be  no  frivolous  lips  to  blas- 
pheme its  solitary  grandeur." 


51 

One  is  reminded  of  La  priere  sur  VAcropole. 
And  indeed  Sylvestre  Bonnard  is  so  like  Renan 
that  his  portrait  could  only  be  the  work  of  a  dis- 
ciple. This  Bonnard  is  a  scholar:  after  ex- 
hausting the  thirteenth  century,  he  turns  to  bot- 
any as  a  recreation — but  he  is  a  scholar  who 
knows  the  vanity  of  documents  proving  the  sale 
of  a  rabbit-hutch  six  hundred  years  ago.  He 
is  a  philosopher  too,  for  his  fruitless  trip  to 
Naples  in  quest  of  a  manuscript  ends  with  the 
admission:  "We  are  eternal  children  and  we 
never  cease  to  run  after  new  toys."  A  lover 
of  books,  he  accepts  philosophically  Madame 
Trepof's  passion  for  collecting  match-boxes: 
"After  all,  they  were  making  a  collection,  and 
could  I  laugh  at  them  without  laughing  at  my- 
self?" 

In  fine,  he  is  a  disillusioned  scholar,  saddened 
by  the  thought  that  his  effort  to  preserve  a  dead 
world  is  both  laborious  and  vain.  "All  that  has 
lived  is  the  destined  nutriment  of  new  lives," 
and  so  the  selling  of  his  library  to  provide 
Jeanne's  dowry  is  as  significant  as  his  turning 
from  philology  to  botany  in  his  old  age. 

Yet  we  must  not  conclude  that  Anatole 
France  finds  science  less  vain  than  philology. 
His  change  of  attitude  on  this  subject  is  re- 
vealed in  the  Discours  aux  etudiants  (1910), 


52 

as  a  warning  against  youth's  habit  of  hasty 
generalization.  "In  those  days" — he  refers  to 
the  period  of  his  first  novel — "in  those  days  we 
were  Darwinians,  evolutionists;  natural  selec- 
tion, systematic  selection,  the  survival  of  the 
fittest,  seemed  to  us  immutable  laws.  And  we 
were  already  working,  with  all  our  hearts,  to 
draw  from  Lamarck's  experiments  and  Dar- 
win's theories  a  philosophy,  a  system  of  ethics, 
social  laws,  a  political  constitution  and  every- 
thing else !" 

Now  listen  to  Sylvestre  once  more — or  rather 
to  Anatole  France  as  he  expresses  himself  four 
years  later  in  Le  Livre  de  mon  ami. 

"Phenomena!  Whom  do  they  not  attract? 
Does  Science  herself,  whose  claims  are  being 
constantly  dinned  into  our  ears,  go  beyond 
mere  seeming?  What,  pray,  does  Professor 
So-and-so  find  at  the  bottom  of  his  microscope  ? 
Appearances  and  nothing  but  appearances.  As 
Euripides  has  said,  we  are  vainly  driven  about 
by  dreams."^ 

To  the  generation  of  Anatole  France,  it 
seemed  that  Science  was  to  solve  the  riddle  of 
life.  He,  too,  had  embarked  with  her  on  her 
quest  of  finality,  only  to  find  that  the  end  of 
the  expedition  was  to  store  the  shelves  of  a 

1  Loc.  cit.,  p.  206. 


53 

museum.  Led  into  erudition  by  its  romance, 
as  an  alchemist  is  lured  on  by  the  dream  of  the 
philosopher's  stone,  Sylvestre  Bonnard  realizes 
at  the  end  that  "those  who  were  worth  more 
than  he,  the  masters,  the  great,  have  died  at 
their  task  without  discovering  that  something 
which,  having  no  body,  has  no  name,  yet  with- 
out which  no  intellectual  labor  would  be  under- 
taken on  this  earth." 

So,  disillusioned,  Anatole  France  turned 
from  science  to  art,  to  explore  the  past  to 
which  his  imagination  called  him,  and  to  crys- 
tallize it,  not  in  history,  but  in  tales  atmospheric 
as  Thais  and  Le  procurateur  de  Judee. 

But  we  must  not  run  ahead  so  far.  Sylvestre 
— or  Anatole,  if  one  prefer — is  now  forty,  tak- 
ing his  first  backward  view.  Imagine  the  mem- 
ories of  childhood  reflected  in  a  mind  so  richly 
stored — in  a  father's  mind  and  heart — and  you 
have  Le  Livre  de  mon  ami.  Imagine  him  at  the 
same  time  composing  a  fairy-tale  for  a  child, 
and  you  have  Aheille.  For  Sylvestre  Bonnard 
is  Anatole  France  at  forty.  Nel  mezzo  del 
cammin  di  nostra  vita,  he  can  view  the  great 
milestone  equably,  and  now,  a  little  past  the 
middle  of  the  road,  look  forward  to  a  tranquil 
journey  down  the  farther  slope.  The  vanity 
of  the  passions  is  known  to  him,  as  he  has  told 


54 

US  in  Jean  Servien.  He  will  repeat  the  lesson 
in  L^  Lys  rouge  and  Histoire  comique,  because 
the  artist  deals  with  life  as  he  finds  it,  but  he 
will  use  his  own  senses  as  a  basis  for  reflection, 
limit  his  hedonism  mainly  to  an  exercise  of  the 
intellect.  This  is  the  second  phase  of  his  talent, 
and  the  fruit  of  that  intellectual  Epicureanism 
we  shall  find  in  Le  Livre  de  mon  ami.  La  Vie 
litteraire,  and  the  early  tales. 

Le  Livre  de  mon  ami  dates  from  1885.  Bon- 
nard  had  said,  unconsciously  defending  his 
choice  in  life,  "the  future  is  made  of  the  past." 
Now,  when  Anatole  France  turned  back  to 
his  Golden  Age,  he  repeats  it  as  an  excuse  for 
setting  down  the  story  of  his  life  as  a  child. 

And  nothing  could  be  more  charming  than 
the  book  which  came  from  it — the  book  drawn 
upon  so  largely  in  an  earlier  chapter.  This 
volume  surpasses  even  the  finest  Contes,  for  no 
sophisticated  art  can  give  the  delicacy  of  an 
artist's  feeling  for  stories  he  has  lived.  It  is 
as  if  he  had  recovered  something  of  the  un- 
tarnished sensitiveness  of  childhood.  "There 
are  times  when  everything  surprises  me,  times 
when  the  simplest  things  give  me  a  mysterious 
thrill."  And  he  senses  the  perpetual  miracle  of 
a  child's  life,  full  of  poetry  because  enwrapped 


55 

in  illusion,  because  each  step  forward  is  led  by 
the  mirage  of  the  unknown. 

"Tout  dans  Timmuable  nature 
Est  miracle  aux  petits  enfants; 
lis  naissent,  et  leur  ame  obscure 
Eclot  dans  des  enchantements 

"L'inconnu,  I'inconnu  divin 
Les  baigne  comme  une  eau  profonde, 
On  les  presse,  on  leur  parle  en  vain, 
lis  habitent  un  autre  monde. .. . 

"Leur  tete  legere  et  ravie 
Songe  tandis  que  nous  pensons : 
lis  font  de  frissons  en  frissons 
La  decouverte  de  la  vie."^ 

This  is  the  spirit  of  the  second  part  of  Le 
Livre  de  mon  ami.  After  the  story  of  his  own 
childhood,  Anatole  France  shows  us  a  father 
realizing  through  sympathy  the  life  of  his  little 
daughter.  The  rest  of  the  book  is  less  personal, 
narrative  giving  way  to  argument  and  discus- 

2  "Though  the  world  unchanging  rolls, 
All  is  wonder  to  the  child; 
Life,  to  little  darkling  souls 
Dawns  in  long  enchantments  mild. 

"  'Tis  the  unknown's  magic  spell, 
Holds  them  'neath  its  mighty  surge ; 
Vain  to  speak  to  them,  or  urge. 
In  a  fairer  world  they  dwell. 

"Little  heads  a-dreaming  still. 
Not  for  them  reflection  gray; 
Life's  discoverers  are  they, 
Living  in  an  endless  thrill." 


56 

sion  in  the  essay  or  dialogue  form.  Anatole 
France  emphasizes  the  folly  of  children's  books, 
books  written  for  children  only — as  if  the  child 
were  not  filled  with  the  thirst  for  the  beautiful 
and  the  desire  for  the  unknown!  He  would 
have  children  read  the  Odyssey  in  translation, 
Don  Quixote,  or  Robinson  Crusoe;  he  would 
never  give  books  of  popular  science  to  the  very 
young,  or  "tell  children  about  guano  instead  of 
fairies." 

And  so  Le  Livre  de  mon  ami  marks  still  more 
clearly  his  revolt  against  science.  ''Our  world 
is  full  of  pharmacists  who  fear  the  imagina- 
tion," he  cries,  "and  very  mistaken  they  are. 
With  all  its  falsehoods,  it  is  imagination  which 
sows  all  beauty,  all  virtue  in  the  world.  Only 
through  it  are  we  great.  Oh  mothers !  have  no 
fear  that  it  will  destroy  your  chilrden !  On  the 
contrary  it  will  keep  them  from  vulgar  faults 
and  facile  mistakes." 

Imagination  is  everything.  "Not  by  the  fac- 
ulty of  laughter  does  man  rise  above  the  ani- 
mals, but  by  the  gift  of  dreaming.  The  story- 
teller remakes  the  world  after  his  own  fashion, 
gives  to  lesser  men,  to  the  simple,  to  children, 
a  chance  to  make  it  over  in  theirs.  He  helps 
man  to  imagine,  to  feel,  and  to  love." 

"To  know  is  nothing,  to  imagine  is  every- 


57 

thing,"  said  the  fairy  of  his  dream  to  Syl- 
vestre  Bonnard.  Now  the  same  message  is 
repeated,  as  Anatole  France  takes  up  the  de- 
fense of  fairy-tales  in  a  Platonic  dialogue  com- 
pleting Le  Livre  de  mon  ami.  Indeed  this 
chapter  might  serve  as  a  preface  to  his  collected 
tales.  "Fairies  exist  precisely  because  they  are 
imaginary,"  he  declares ;  "liberty  is  an  illusion 
and  the  fairy  a  reality."  Then  he  goes  on  to 
show  how  these  stories  sprang  from  primi- 
tive man's  religion — how  the  first  myths,  for- 
gotten by  men,  survived  on  the  lips  of  the 
grandmother  spinning  by  the  fireside — an  eter- 
nal delight  to  the  children  of  her  child.  So 
grand'mere  herself  became  a  myth,  "la  Mere 
rOie."  And  "La  Reine  Pedauque,"  repre- 
sented on  the  portals  of  so  many  French 
churches,  at  Troyes,  Dijon,  and  Nevers,  is 
Mother  Goose  herself.  So  we  are  prepared 
for  his  own  tales  and  the  title  of  one  of  the 
best  among  them. 

The  poet  in  Anatole  France  has  come  to  life 
again.  Just  completed,  his  first  fairy-story 
Aheille  indicates  the  part  he  has  chosen.  "For 
myself,"  he  asserts  in  the  last  pages  of  Le 
Livre  de  mon  ami,  "I  would  gladly  give  a 
whole  library  of  the  philosophers  rather  than 
lose  the  fairy-tale  Peau  d'dne." 


CHAPTER  IV 


THE  DREAMER  OF  THE  PAST:  EARLY  TALES  AND 
"THAIS"  (1883-92). 


IV 


6  6  T  T  is  not  science,  it  is  poetry  which  charms 
A  and  which  consoles.  That  is  why  poetry 
is  more  necessary  than  science."  In  the  story 
of  Aheille  (1883)  is  found  for  a  third  time  the 
text  of  the  dialogue,  with  its  poet's  protest 
against  the  stifling  of  childhood's  dreams.  No, 
surely  Aheille  was  "not  meant  for  the  rational 
souls  who  despise  trifles  and  call  for  constant 
instruction."  Such  a  fairy-tale  Perrault  him- 
self might  have  written,  or  Nodier  told  to  his 
daughter  by  the  evening  fire.  Like  Le  Livre 
de  mon  ami,  Aheille  springs  from  a  scholar's 
idealization  of  fatherhood;  and  so  too  do  the 
nursery  stories  of  Nos  Enfants  (1886),  candid 
and  idyllic  as  the  pictures  drawn  for  them  by 
Boutet  de  Monvel. 

Did  these  books  turn  the  poet  back  to  his  art? 
Did  the  tiny  heroine  of  Aheille  charm  him  away 
from  the  uglier  life  of  to-day?  A  little  child 
shall  lead  them,  even  the  misguided  ones  who 


62 

write  of  heroes  like  Jean  Servien.  At  any  rate, 
this  charming  tale  gave  its  author  new  wings, 
and  now  for  a  decade  he  was  to  neglect  the 
modern  novel  for  the  conte  and  the  causerie 
litteraire. 

His  first  sheaf  of  tales  was  gathered  under 
the  title  Balthasar  (1889).  Aheille  of  course 
was  included,  but  of  the  other  stories  only  two 
are  modern.  And  these  get  their  plots  from 
hypnotism  and  suggestion:  Anatole  France  is 
still  pursuing  romance  among  the  marvels  of 
science.  But  the  tale  which  gives  its  caption 
to  the  volume  is  made  of  Biblical  figures:  his- 
tory and  legend  are  ever  drawing  him  more 
deeply  into  the  past. 

Balthasar  is  the  pagan  king  of  Ethiopia.  He 
loves  the  queen  of  Sheba,  that  mysterious  Balkis 
who,  for  us,  lives  on  in  the  tales  of  Nodier  and 
Nerval  and  La  Tentation  de  Saint- Ant oine.  He 
woos  this  languid  beauty,  protests  his  desire  to 
serve,  until  she  admits  her  one  unsatisfied  de- 
sire: "I  should  like  to  be  afraid."  Curious  as 
the  Roman  ladies  of  the  decadence,  she  longs 
to  meet  danger,  to  face  the  unknown,  the  ter- 
rors of  the  night  and  its  mysterious  qualms. 
So  they  seek  adventure  in  the  Queen's  capital, 
their  golden  raiment  doflfed  for  beggar's  garb. 

"The  night  was  black.    Balkis  was  very  tiny 


63 

in  the  night."  Yet  tiny  as  she  is,  the  love  of 
danger  makes  her  brave,  and  she  leads  her 
lover  to  a  pot-house  of  the  slums.  Here,  in  the 
company  of  porters  and  prostitutes,  Balkis 
tastes  the  unknown  savor  of  salt  fish  and  on- 
ions. But  having  forgotten  to  bring  money, 
they  are  set  upon  with  threats  and  blows,  and 
the  King  only  wins  their  freedom  by  main  force. 
Not  until  then  does  Balkis  tell  her  burly  cham- 
pion that  she  loves  him. 

Balthasar  has  shed  his  blood  for  her.  And 
he  sheds  it  again  before  the  adventure  ends, 
and  they  are  rescued  from  the  brigands  who 
find  them  sleeping  in  the  hills.  Struck  down 
now  in  her  defense,  unconscious  through  days 
and  nights  of  raving,  he  rises  from  his  bed  to 
find  her  closeted  with  a  new  lover,  and  to  his 
mage  he  complains  of  the  evils  of  this  world. 
''Wisdom  makes  one  happy,"  replies  the  astrol- 
oger, and  the  King  sets  out  in  search  of  wis- 
dom. 

He  builds  a  tower  to  observe  the  stars,  and 
then  he  knows  the  blessings  of  the  sage.  "While 
I  am  studying  astronomy,  I  do  not  think  of 
Balkis,  nor  of  anything  whatsoever.  The  sci- 
ences are  useful ;  they  keep  men  from  thinking. 
Sembobitis,  teach  me  the  knowledge  which  de- 
stroys feeling  in  man,  and  I  shall  raise  you  in 


64 

honors  among  my  people."  So  his  mage  in- 
structs him  in  the  secrets  of  the  sky. 

He  learns  how  to  draw  horoscopes.  At  last 
he  can  draw  them  as  well  as  Sembobitis  himself. 
Has  he  discovered  the  way  of  truth?  Are  his 
predictions  accurate?  "Science  is  infallible," 
replies  his  teacher,  *'but  scholars  are  constantly 
making  mistakes."  And  Sembobitis  denies  the 
King's  discovery,  a  new  star,  a  wonderful  new 
star  which  promises  well  for  some  unknown 
nativity. 

Meanwhile  Balkis  learns  that  the  King  has 
forgotten  her,  and  straightway  knows  that  she 
loves  him  only.  Dismissing  her  new  lover,  she 
sets  out  to  find  the  old,  and  her  camel-train 
winds  its  way  across  the  desert  sands  toward 
the  astronomer-king.  From  his  tower  he  des- 
cries her,  in  all  her  beauty,  but  despite  the  ter- 
rible force  that  draws  him  earthward,  he  lifts 
his  eyes  again  to  the  wonderful  star,  and  it 
bids  him  follow  its  light  to  One  who,  in  reward 
for  his  seeking,  has  promised  him  true  riches 
and  joy  and  love. 

So  he  sets  out  to  meet  Gaspard  and  Melchior 
already  on  their  way.  Many  days  they  follow 
the  star,  until  it  rests  over  the  manger  in  Beth- 
lehem. "And  entering  the  dwelling,  they  found 
the  Child  with  Mary  His  mother,  and  they 


65 

bowed  down  and  worshiped  Him;  and  offered 
Him  gold  and  incense  and  myrrh,  as  it  is  re- 
lated in  the  Gospel." 

Certainly  the  claims  of  science  are  not  taken 
very  seriously  in  Balthasar.  But  the  baldest 
parody  of  scholarship  is  reached  in  the  next 
story,  Monsieur  Pigeonneau,  an  archeological 
fantasy  such  as  Gautier  loved.  Monsieur  Pi- 
geonneau is  a  caricature  of  Sylvestre  Bonnard, 
a  Germanized  savant  who  hates  imagination  as 
"the  crudest  enemy  of  science."  To  this  fat- 
uous Dr.  Dryasdust  comes  a  charming  Ameri- 
can girl,  seeking  advice  on  the  details  of  an 
Egyptian  costume  to  wear  at  a  ball.  Then  she 
asks  him  for  a  fairy-tale,  adding,  "What  would 
be  the  use  of  science,  if  it  didn't  help  you  to 
write  tales  ?"  And  the  academician  is  forced  to 
write  it  for  her,  hypnotized  by  the  eyes  of  the 
Egyptian  cat  she  has  given  him. 

The  other  stories  of  the  volume  are  of  less 
importance.  Uoeuf  rouge,  in  which  a  neuras- 
thenic goes  mad  because  an  anecdote  from 
Lampridius  has  convinced  him  that  he  is  a 
Roman  emperor,  recalls  Jocaste.  A  blended 
texture  of  theology,  occultism,  and  voluptuous- 
ness gives  color  to  La  iille  de  Lilith,  the  story 
of  a  preadamite  maiden,  whose  prayer,  "Prom- 
ise me  death  that  I  may  enjoy  life,  give  me  re- 


morse  that  I  may  find  pleasure,"  shows  that 
Anatole  France  had  not  entirely  forgotten  Bau- 
delaire and  his  breviary  of  Satanism.  There  is 
something  of  Gautier's  fancy  in  this  story  of 
the  deathless  Leila ;  something  of  Gautier,  too, 
in  the  tale  of  Laeta  A  cilia,  a  resurrection  of 
Roman  and  Christian  antiquity,  contrasted  as 
in  Arria  Marcella.  Piquant  and  typical  of  the 
mixed  ideals  of  our  author  is  the  apposition  of 
these  two  worlds  in  the  types  he  has  chosen: 
the  Roman  senator's  wife,  rich,  aristocratic, 
and  contemptuous  of  this  new  religion  of  slaves, 
and  the  figure  of  Mary  Magdalene,  already 
used  in  a  poem  published  in  1876 — a  sinner- 
saint  like  the  heroine  of  his  next  volume. 

This,  of  course,  is  the  contrasted  motif  of 
Les  Noces  corinthiennes.  But  Thais,  a  year 
later,  shows  even  better  the  conflict  of  interests 
which  sways  this  intellectual  Epicurean.  Hu- 
manist and  skeptic,  a  "pagan  with  a  Catholic 
imagination,"  Anatole  France  now  turned  to 
that  Alexandrian  age  whose  poets  had  been  his 
delight  in  days  at  school.  From  his  boyhood 
on  he  had  loved  the  Lives  of  the  Saints,  and  at 
fifteen  he  had  already  written,  as  a  school  exer- 
cise. La  vie  de  Sainte-Radegonde.  The  Chris- 
tian anchorites  had  always  fascinated  this  monk 
of  letters,  and  now  setting  one  of  them  against 


67 

the  paganism  of  Alexandria,  he  Hmned  a  fresco 
full  of  contrasted  and  exotic  color. 

Thais  is  a  legend  retold,  and  gilded  in  the 
telling.  Every  one  knows  the  story  that  Mas- 
senet has  made  into  an  opera.  But  the  web 
of  this  fabric  came  from  a  library — from  a 
medievalist's  library.  The  original  life  of  Paph- 
nutius  is  a  naive  Latin  drama,  written  in  the 
days  of  the  Emperor  Otto  by  a  Saxon  nun. 
Anatole  France  was  deeply  interested  in  this 
conventual  blue-stocking  and  her  miracle-plays : 
witness  the  pages  on  Hroswitha  in  the  third 
volume  oi  La  Vie  litter  aire. 

In  this  primitive  miracle-play,  Thais  is  a 
courtesan  redeemed  by  a  holy  monk,  who  gains 
admittance  to  her  in  the  guise  of  a  lover — suh 
specie  amatoris.  In  the  version  of  Anatole 
France  the  anchorite  pays  the  price  of  his  con- 
ceit by  yielding  at  last  to  a  passionate  love  of 
his  fair  convert.  The  despiser  of  the  flesh  is 
conquered  by  the  flesh :  no  penance  and  no  dis- 
cipline avail.  Sinner  is  changed  to  saint  and 
saint  to  sinner ;  Aphrodite  is  avenged,  and  the 
amiable  skeptic  who  had  voiced  the  fear  of  her 
resentment,  Nicias  the  Cyrenaic,  is  seen  to  be 
the  ideal  of  the  author,  an  intellectual  hedonist, 
an  ironical  dilettante  of  the  senses  and  the  arts. 

Such  is  the  simple  fabric  that  Anatole  France 


68 

has  embroidered  into  Thais.  But  only  an  artist, 
with  an  artist's  imagination  and  a  painter's 
touch,  could  have  clothed  the  rude  skeleton  of 
the  legend  with  such  living  flesh.  Only  a  great 
artist  could  have  breathed  into  his  Galatea  the 
mingled  fire  and  languor  of  this  cultured  and 
corrupted  age,  posed  her  against  so  rich  a 
background — Alexandria  with  its  shining  roofs 
under  a  hot  blue  tropical  sky,  the  yellow  Nile 
and  the  Pyramids,  and  the  desert  dreaming  its 
infinite  dream  before  an  unseeing  Sphinx.  Rich 
as  Titian's  or  Tintoretto's  pictures,  and  no  less 
indifferent  to  Puritanism,  Thais  stands  out  like 
an  oil-painting  against  the  softer  water-colors 
of  Les  Noces  corinthiennes — similar  in  motif, 
but  infinitely  stronger  in  texture  and  impasto. 
It  is  a  conte  philosophiqiie,  like  Voltaire's;  a 
fresco  filled  with  all  the  philosophies  which 
flourished  in  the  ancient  world,  before  the  scroll 
was  erased  and  written  over  into  the  palimpsest 
of  Christianity. 

Thais  is  a  pageant  of  metaphysics,  a  proces- 
sion of  the  systems.  Not  one  but  has  its  advocate 
— as  in  La  Tentation  de  Saint-Antoine — at  the 
symposium  in  the  second  chapter.  And  the  dis-. 
cussion  only  ends  when  the  Stoic,  full  of  years 
and  wisdom,  dies  conversing  with  his  friends, 
a  voluntary  Socrates  who  might  be  suspected 


69 

of  having  read  Marcus  Aurelius.  Yet  if  every 
attitude  is  presented  in  the  story,  it  is  really 
skepticism  which  prevails.  The  disciple  of 
Pyrrho  alone  may  accept  equally  all  the  philos- 
ophies, enjoy  as  poetry  all  these  "sick  men's 
dreams."  "For  the  systems  constructed  by  the 
sages  are  only  tales  invented  to  amuse  the  eter- 
nal childhood  of  man."  They,  too,  are  part  of 
the  eternal  Hnx,  seen  differently  by  all  the  chil- 
dren of  men.  "The  pyramids  of  Memphis 
seem,  at  daybreak,  like  cones  of  rosy  light.  At 
sunset  they  appear  like  black  triangles  against 
the  flaming  sky.  But  who  shall  penetrate  their 
substance  ?" 

Never,  perhaps,  was  philosophic  nihilism  so 
beautifully  arrayed.  But  poetry  and  philosophy 
are  not  so  far  apart,  after  all.  The  philosophy 
may  be  taken  largely  from  a  book  on  the  Greek 
skeptics,  as  Anatole  France  admits  in  La  Vie 
litteraire,^  but  the  touch  of  the  poet  has  trans- 
formed it,  as  Flaubert  changed  erudition  to  art 
in  La  Tentation  de  Saint- Ant oine. 

Clearly,  Flaubert  served  as  model  here,  as 
he  had  done  in  parts  of  Jocaste.  The  Tentation, 
too,  is  a  metaphysical  and  mystic  orgy,  a  Satur- 

1 II,  134.    Many  realistic  touches  were  also  taken  from  Ame- 
linot,  La  Thebaide,  reviewed  by  Anatole  France  about  this  time. 


70 

nalian  revelry  of  philosophies.  Here,  too,  we 
find  the  Gymnosophist  of  Thais,  the  comparison 
between  Buddhism  and  Christianity,  the  oppo- 
sition of  the  spirit  and  the  flesh  —  that  real 
struggle  which,  as  a  foil  to  the  dilettantism  of 
the  banquet  scene,  completes  the  paradox  of 
Thais.  The  setting  of  the  final  chapter,  when 
the  too  heroic  monk  goes  back  to  his  desert  and 
his  new  temptations,  the  Egyptian  tomb  with 
its  wall-paintings,  the  monsters,  the  pack  of 
jackals,  are  all  reminiscent  of  Flaubert.  The 
agonies  of  Saint  Anthony  fall  also  upon  Paph- 
nuce,  but  in  his  case  the  cross  does  not  conquer 
at  the  end.  Too  blind  to  see  the  salvation  offered 
to  his  soul  in  useful  labor,  the  monk  vainly 
carries  his  temptations  to  a  pillar  and  thence  to 
a  desert  tomb:  now  he  cannot  distinguish  the 
voice  of  the  Devil  from  the  voice  of  God.  Vain, 
too,  his  final  yielding  to  the  hopes  of  life  and 
love  so  long  despised,  since  he  reaches  his  con- 
vert only  to  see  her  die,  a  saint,  while  her  sisters 
in  piety  drive  him  away  from  the  body  as  if  he 
were  a  vampire. 

Christianity  had  triumphed  over  paganism  in 
Les  Noces  corinthiennes.  In  Thais  the  pagan 
spirit  triumphs  in  its  turn.  One  other  stand- 
point remained,  to  show  the  new  faith  ignored 
by  the    old,  insignificant    and    virtually  non- 


71 

existent  in  a  mightier  social  and  religious  order. 
This  point  of  view  is  vividly  presented  in  Le 
procurateur  de  Judee. 

The  story  is  found  in  L'Etui  de  nacre,  pub- 
lished two  years  later  (1892).  None  of  the 
tales  is  so  faultless  in  technique,  none  so  char- 
acteristic of  Anatole  France  in  its  psychologic 
insight  and  atmosphere.  A  touch  of  his  magi- 
cian's wand,  and  we  see  Baise  of  old — a  marble 
city  bathed  by  a  sapphire  sea.  We  walk  the 
vine-clad  hills  above  the  town,  watch  the  meet- 
ing of  Laelius  Lamia  and  his  old  friend  Pontius 
Pilatus,  hear  their  reminiscences  at  the  dinner 
in  the  villa,  sympathize  with  the  former  procu- 
rator, now  deprived  of  his  province,  in  the  un- 
merited disgrace  which  has  fallen  upon  him 
after  a  lifetime  devoted  to  the  Empire.  More 
than  this,  we  share  his  resentment  at  the  cause 
of  his  ruin,  the  obstinate  cringing  fanatic  race 
which  had  refused  his  aqueducts  and  opposed 
his  justice  and  zeal  in  their  behalf. 

Then  the  two  friends  speak  of  the  religion  of 
the  Jews.  Half  mockingly,  Lamia  remarks  that 
some  day  the  Jewish  Jupiter  may  find  a  place 
in  the  Pantheon  of  Rome.  Pilate  smiles,  con- 
vinced that  a  people  still  quarreling  over  its 
dogmas  cannot  impose  them  upon  the  outside 
world.  He  recalls  to  Lamia  the  mad  intolerance 


72 

of  the  Jews,  their  zeal  in  persecuting  heretics, 
their  constant  appeals  to  him  for  the  death  of 
the  unorthodox.  Forced  as  a  Roman  executive 
to  sanction  their  decrees,  unable  to  make  them 
tolerant  and  reasonable  in  matters  of  religion, 
he  has  had  his  very  justice  made  the  basis  of 
complaints  to  the  proconsul,  so  that  in  the  end 
he  has  lost  his  province  thereby.  And  he  con- 
cludes from  such  unreason  that  the  Jews  must 
be  destroyed. 

Lamia  tries  to  calm  his  virtuous  wrath.  He 
speaks  of  the  simple  hearts  he  has  found  among 
this  people,  of  the  heroic  heretics  he  has  seen 
die  for  a  cause.  For  he  too  has  lived  in  Judea, 
Pilate's  guest  for  many  years,  after  his  indis- 
cretions had  banished  him  from  Rome.  Then 
he  praises  the  beauty  of  their  women,  while 
Pontius  blames  him  for  a  conduct  which  has 
given  no  children  to  the  State.  Yet  Lamia  con- 
tinues, vaunting  the  grace  of  the  Syrian  dan- 
cers, like  the  voluptuary  he  is,  until  he  comes 
to  mention  an  old  love — a  girl  who  left  him  to 
join  the  band  of  a  young  Galilean  thaumaturge, 
Jesus  of  Nazareth.  And  he  asks  Pilate  if  he 
remembers  this  man,  put  to  death  for  some  for- 
gotten cause. 

Pilate  knits  his  brows.  Then,  after  some 
moments  of  silence  he  replies: 


"Jesus?  Jesus  of  Nazareth?  I  don't  recol- 
lect him." 

And  so  the  story  leaves  you.  It  is  a  perfect 
climax,  disconcerting  but  inevitable.  It  con- 
centrates a  w^hole  age  of  history  in  a  single 
phrase :  and  that  phrase  reveals  and  intensifies 
the  picture  behind  it  like  a  flash  of  lightning. 
What  more  could  be  said?  When  we  recover 
from  the  shock  of  this  white  magic,  we  can 
only  wonder  at  the  sorcerer  who  summoned 
the  vision  from  the  fumes  of  false  historical 
interpretation. 

To  formulate  the  psychology  of  the  past — 
that  is  the  special  insight  given  to  Anatole 
France.  He  reads  the  Roman  mind ;  he  reads, 
too,  the  souls  in  which  the  seeds  of  Christianity 
were  first  sown.  After  Pontius  Pilate,  a  splen- 
did foil,  L'Etui  de  nacre  gives  us  the  stories  of 
Amycus  et  Celestin,  oi  Saint e  Oliverie  et  Saint e 
Liberette,oi  Saint e  Ell phro sine,  Scolastica,  and 
Le  jongleur  de  Notre-Dame.  What  a  vision 
of  the  early  Christians  and  the  Middle  Ages 
in  the  candor  of  these  legends  retold!  Free 
from  irony  or  philosophic  intention,  such  richly 
illuminated  pages  defy  analysis.  One  must 
read  them  in  order  to  feel  their  qualities,  deli- 
cate as  the  work  of  a  Fra  Angelico  in  prose. 

Nor  is  there  need  to  relate  the  anecdotes  of 


74 

the  French  Revolution  which  make  the  last  half 
of  the  volume  a  promise  of  Les  Dieux  ont  soif. 
Menwires  d'un  volontaire  is  a  literary  mosaic, 
made  up,  as  the  author  tells  us,  of  real  happen- 
ings in  the  eighteenth  century,  while  some  of 
the  other  tales  are  borrowed  from  anecdotes 
first  told  in  L^  Livre  de  mon  ami.^  The  physi- 
cian who  neglected  the  sick  dauphin  in  order  to 
care  for  a  peasant  woman  in  childbirth,  the  aris- 
tocrat who  hid  a  refugee  between  the  mattresses 
of  her  bed,  the  fatal  love-letters  thrust  under 
a  sofa  when  the  patriots  surprise  Milady  in  her 
task  of  destruction,  reappear  in  L'auhe,  Ma- 
dame de  Luzy,  and  Le  petit  soldat  de  plomb. 
As  we  have  seen  before,  Anatole  France  is  fond 
of  quoting  himself.  But  criticism  is  disarmed 
when,  at  the  end  of  the  last  episode,  the  author 
states  his  belief  "that  he  has  already  heard  that 
story  somewhere,"  and  we  turn  back  indul- 
gently to  the  earlier  version,  wondering  if  it  is 
truth  or  poetry.  Did  these  things  really  hap- 
pen to  his  eighteenth-century  grandmother,  and 
did  her  unwritten  memoirs  inspire  in  the  grand- 
son his  interest  in  the  French  Revolution  ? 

However  that  may  be,  the  stories  bear  the 
stamp  of  historical  truth.  The  imagination  of 
Anatole  France  was  quick  to  catch  the  generous 

2  Loc.  cit.,  pp.  89-94. 


75 

ardor  behind  the  first  Revolutionary  dream  of 
equaHty.  The  hopes  of  1789 — with  the  Bastille 
destroyed  and  the  Golden  Age  brought  back  to 
earth — that  vision  of  fraternity  which  only  too 
soon  degenerated  into  suspicion  and  denuncia- 
tion— how  all  this  age  of  idealism  lives  again 
for  us,  relieved  against  the  prison  and  the  aw- 
ful shadow  of  the  guillotine!  He  loves  this 
ancien  regime,  with  its  Epicurean  poise,  its 
irony  and  its  quiet  heroism,  and  when  he  de- 
picts a  grande  dame  renouncing  her  hope  of 
love  and  freedom  to  save  a  turnkey's  daughter 
(La  victime  volontaire) ,  one  can  see  his  native 
sympathy  for  the  culture  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, the  last  flower  of  a  forgotten  chivalry  and 
an  outworn  Renaissance. 

*T  love  the  things  of  days  gone  by  and  I  like 
to  live  in  the  company  of  the  dead,"  says  this 
scholar-poet.  And  we  may  add  with  him, 
"Who  of  us  does  not  like  to  live  in  the  past? 
Who  of  us  does  not  sometimes  feel  the  need  of 
it  ?  It  would  be  too  little  to  live  in  the  present, 
for  the  present  is  but  a  point  that  flees  inces- 
santly." So  Anatole  France  wrote  his  tales  of 
other  times,  finding  in  them  not  merely  the  joys 
of  a  scholar  and  an  antiquarian,  but  the  door 
which  best  ofifered  an  escape  from  unromantic 
reality,  from  the  dull  prose  of  a  scientific  and 


76 

materialistic  age.  It  is  a  dream-country  to 
which  he  carries  us  in  these  vivid  fables,  a 
strand  far  from  the  barren  factory-dotted  land- 
scape of  the  present — Rome  or  Alexandria,  the 
naive  age  of  faith,  the  fiery  Renaissance,  or  the 
stirring  days  of  the  Revolution.  But  by  its 
definition  the  tale  must  transport  the  reader  to 
the  land  of  dreams. 

Anatole  France  takes  us  there  in  a  magic 
boat.  There  are  none  who  may  not  embark,  set 
sail  with  him  for  enchanted  seas.  None  will 
fail  to  see  how  a  real  vision  inspired  these  voy- 
ages, but  only  the  scholar,  conscious  of  his 
sources,  will  know  the  toil  which  built  the  fairy- 
ship  or  freighted  it  for  our  delight.  For  the 
author  himself  is  speaking  in  the  confession  of 
Jacques  Tournebroche :  "Like  Aulus  Gellius, 
who  brought  together  the  finest  pages  of  the 
philosophers  in  his  Attic  Nights,  like  Apuleius 
who  put  into  his  Metamorphoses  the  best  of 
the  fables  of  the  Greeks,  I  give  myself  the 
labors  of  the  honey-bee  in  order  to  distil  a  nec- 
tar divine." 


CHAPTER  V 


THE   MONK   OF   LETTERS:    CRITICISM   AND    THE 
REACTION   TO   LIFE    (1887-92). 


First  published  in  the  Sewanee  Review,  this  chapter  is  here 
reprinted  by  kind  permission  of  the  editor. 


V 


AFTER  the  story,  we  turn  again  to  the  story- 
L  teller.  Books  like  these,  certainly,  are 
only  born  in  a  poet's  mind.  None  but  a  poet 
could  have  dreamed  Thais  and  the  desert  and 
the  Nile,  and  the  white  city  by  the  inland  sea. 
Only  a  poet  could  have  lived  again  in  sympathy 
the  lives  of  the  saints,  thrilled  to  the  mingled 
horror  and  heroism  of  the  Revolution,  seen  in 
Pontius  Pilate  the  spirit  of  a  world-empire. 
But  to  realize  these  dreams  of  a  dead  past,  to 
make  them  vivid  and  clear  and  convincing  as 
a  modern  novel,  took  something  more  than 
mere  imagination.  Call  it  clairvoyance  if  you 
will;  clairvoyance  of  this  sort  is  really  histor- 
ical insight  based  on  critical  scholarship.  The 
story-teller  is  a  poet,  but  he  is  also  the  subtlest 
of  critics. 

Too  subtle,  perhaps,  for  great  lyricism.  In 
any  case,  one  may  catch  too  early  the  trick  of 
rationalizing  emotion.    If  Le  Livre  de  mon  ami 


80 

is  a  confession,  this  sensitive  boy  needed  no 
priestly  training  to  show  him  how  to  apply  dia- 
lectics to  experience. 

Let  us  go  back  to  his  literary  beginnings. 
Naturally,  the  poet  found  expression  first.  But 
as  we  have  seen,  verse  was  not  his  only  inter- 
est :  even  in  his  Parnassian  days,  his  other  tal- 
ent was  leading  him  to  biography.  As  early 
as  1868,  he  had  made  his  study  of  Alfred  de 
Vigny,  and  Lemerre  had  given  him  the  editor- 
ship of  a  series  of  French  classics.  So  he  wrote 
the  lives  of  many  a  favorite  author,  now  col- 
lected and  reprinted  in  Genie  latin  (1913).  In 
1874,  he  had  published  the  first  of  these  inter- 
esting studies,  Racine;  in  1877,  Bernardin  de 
Saint-Pierre,  L'Ahhe  Prevost,  and  Moliere;  in 
1878,  Le  Sage;  in  1879,  Marguerite  de  Na- 
varre, Sainte-Beuve,  and  Chateaubriand.  From 
1 88 1  to  1890  his  growing  success  as  a  novelist 
reduced  the  list  to  Scarron,  Madame  de  la 
Fayette,  La  Fontaine,  and  Benjamin  Constant. 
Theocrite,  which  has  the  place  of  honor  in  the 
collection,  dates  from  1896,  when  his  labors  as 
prefacier  were  almost  over. 

It  is  well  to  have  these  juvenilia  collected  and 
reprinted.  They  are  the  beginnings  of  the 
critic  who,  for  good  or  evil,  broke  the  last  bonds 
of  criticism.    If  not  scholarly  biographies,  per- 


81 

haps,  contemptuous  of  all  but  documentary 
proofs,  they  are  real  portraits ;  and  when  detail 
is  slurred,  it  is  to  give  greater  truth  of  color 
and  atmosphere.  Being  an  artist  rather  than  a 
scholar,  the  author  finds  the  date  less  impor- 
tant than  the  adjective.  More  than  this,  he 
recognizes  the  limits  of  his  canvas.  To  know 
the  scholar's  labors  and  to  know  when  to  forget 
them  is  the  mark  of  the  true  humanist,  and  no 
other  may  wield  a  pen  at  all  comparable  to  the 
sword. 

A  little  tact  is  not  useless  in  the  critic's  trade. 
And  Anatole  France  had  more  than  a  little. 
He  knew  that  he  was  writing  for  the  greater 
public,  for  those  who  usually  neglect  prefaces, 
and  he  hoped  he  was  writing  to  be  read.  He 
must  divine  his  audience — possible  readers  of 
his  future  novels — avoid  equally  the  steeps  of 
pedantry  and  the  shoals  of  platitude.  He  must 
charm,  and  he  had  not  yet  learned  the  secret 
of  charming  by  holding  up  the  mirror  to  his 
changing  moods.  Ten,  fifteen  years  younger 
than  the  critic  of  La  Vie  litteraire,  he  feels  that 
he  must  take  his  subject  seriously,  yet  he  does 
find  the  secret  of  charming  in  a  sympathetic 
touch  and  in  lively  contrasts  of  characteristic 
background  or  pose. 

It  is  sympathy  which  makes  the  portrait  live. 


82 


It  is  sympathy  which  leads  the  artist  to  the 
heart  of  his  model.  So  this  young  critic  turns 
instinctively  to  types  like  himself.  First  he 
takes  up  his  favorite  Racine,  and  the  portrait 
is  rich  in  glimpses  of  the  artist  who  drew  it. 
With  Racine,  Anatole  France  knew  "the  charms 
of  a  pious  education  for  the  ardent  young  souls 
that  it  does  not  stifle";  he  too  had  known  the 
malady  of  the  cloister,  its  dangerous  gift  of 
intermingling  life  and  dreams,  to  lose  oneself 
therein.^  But  when  he  adds  that  religion  offers 
to  voluptuous  souls  "la  volupte  de  se  perdre," 
we  realize  suddenly  that  this  gentle  classicist  is 
also  an  admirer  of  Baudelaire ! 

The  'prentice  critic  finds  it  hard  not  to  read 
himself  into  his  model.  Be  the  subject  well 
chosen,  his  own  experience  serves  as  a  divining- 
rod.  So  for  Anatole  France  there  is  no  contra- 
diction in  the  mocking  sallies  of  le  tendre  Ra- 
cine: "The  same  nervous  sensibility  which  ex- 
cites one  to  weep  at  many  things  provokes 
laughter  at  many  others."'  With  Racine,  he 
had  thrilled  in  boyhood  to  the  beauty  of  the 
classics;  he  too  had  known  the  visions  which 
float  through  a  poet's  soul  before  the  words 
come  to  set  them  free.'  And  in  spite  of  all  his 
self-suppression  in  these  studies,  which  were 

1  Loc.  cit,  p.  139.  2  Ibid.,  p.  144.  » Ibid.,  p.  139. 


83 

written  at  the  same  time  as  his  early  essays 
in  naturalistic  fiction,  Anatole  France  already 
declares  that  what  we  love  and  value  in  others 
is  "only  the  points  of  relationship  which  bind 
them  to  ourselves."* 

Thus  he  foreshadows  the  subjective  critic  of 
La  Vie  litteraire.  The  later  digressions  may 
be  lacking,  but  never  the  tender  irony,  the  play- 
ful grace  and  wit  that  mark  the  personal  atti- 
tude. He  frankly  admits  that  he  has  not  read 
a  serious  work  of  Prevost,  Le  Monde  moral; 
but  his  portrait  of  the  soldier-abbe  and  de- 
frocked Bohemian  does  not  sufifer  by  the  omis- 
sion. Naturally,  the  future  creator  of  Jerome 
Coignard  will  see  the  picturesque  in  such  a 
man :  he  will  like  to  explore  that  heart  divided 
between  the  love  of  religion  and  the  loves  of 
this  world.  No  one  could  be  more  clever  in 
his  setting  of  the  background,  as  when  he  be- 
gins a  study  of  Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre  by 
a  swift  sketch  of  his  native  seaport,  or  relieves 
a  portrait  of  Chateaubriand  against  a  sombre 
Breton  landscape  of  barren  heath  and  donjon 
and  never  silent  sea.  No  one  quicker  to  see 
the  universal  humanity  in  his  sitters,  or  to 
illustrate  a  modern  text  from  the  golden  stores 
of  the  Greeks.     And  if  he  cannot  resist  the 

*  Ibid.,  p.  ISO. 


84 

temptation  of  an  occasional  quaint  archaism, 
he  knows  that  to  be  truly  classic  one  must  be 
simple  and  natural.  "Ce  n'est  pas  en  faisant 
du  grec  qu'on  ressemble  le  plus  aux  Grecs." 
He  will  be  himself,  and  it  is  not  Moliere  nor 
Scarron  nor  Le  Sage,  but  the  poets  Racine, 
Sainte-Beuve,  and  Chateaubriand  whose  por- 
traits stir  him  to  freest  self-expression. 

**The  works  that  are  least  vain  were  created 
by  those  who  best  saw  the  vanity  of  all  things. 
One  must  pay  for  the  pride  of  thinking  in  sad- 
ness and  desolation."^  This  is  found  in  the 
essay  on  Racine.  Thus  the  very  first  of  these 
studies,  dating  from  1874,  reflects  the  earlier, 
essential  Anatole  France,  the  seeker  disillu- 
sioned and  bitter,  before  he  has  taken  disillu- 
sion for  a  mask.  This  is  our  skeptic  at  thirty, 
judging  his  youth's  attempt  to  solve  the  riddle 
of  the  universe  by  nineteenth-century  science 
and  eighteenth-century  philosophy.  When,  thir- 
teen years  later,  he  replaced  Jules  Claretie  as 
literary  critic  of  Le  Temps,  he  had  learned, 
like  Montaigne,  how  easy  it  was  to  sleep  in 
peace  on  the  pillow  of  doubt  —  and  even  to 
dream  delightfully  upon  it.  He  had  become 
the  "mocking  Benedictine"  of  his  editor's  fancy, 
a  philosophic  monk  of  a  dilettante  Abbey  of 
» Ibid.,  p.  154. 


85 

Thelema,  indulgent  and  pious,  skeptical  yet  re- 
signed, bound  to  the  status  quo  by  pessimism 
and  esthetic  dislike  of  change.  Sylvestre  Bon- 
nard,  the  scholar  who  had  used  books  to  es- 
cape from  the  present,  "for  every  age  is  com- 
monplace to  those  who  live  in  it,"  now  opened 
his  study  window. 

.  Hence  the  four  volumes  of  La  Vie  litteraire 
( 1 888- 1 892),  made  up  of  these  weekly  chats  on 
books  and  men  and  events.  No  dry  reviewing 
this,  but  scholarship  on  a  holiday,  familiar  and 
genial,  yet  rich  in  many  a  philosophic  vista. 
Like  the  Lady  of  Shalott,  the  student  of  the 
past  views  in  art's  mirror  the  reflected  life  of 
to-day,  and  this  partial  approach  to  reality 
seems  only  to  confirm  him  in  his  Pyrrhonism. 
Half  a  dozen  years  older,  he  is  no  longer  the 
optimist  Sylvestre.  He  is  Renan  in  his  last 
stage,  tired  of  serious  scholarship  and  amusing 
himself  with  ideas.  Ernest  Renan,  "le  plus 
sage  des  hommes,"  is  now  his  master,  and  if 
we  turn  back  three  years  to  Le  Livre  de  mon 
ami,  we  shall  find,  in  a  dialogue  directly  imi- 
tated from  Dialogues  philosophiques,  the  very 
spirit  of  Renan's  final  dilettantism:  "I  shall 
mingle  in  one  love  the  two  children  of  my 
thought,  so  as  not  to  do  injury  to  my  real  son.'" 

«  Loc.  cit.,  p.  285. 


86 

Add  to' this  his  very  evident  admiration  for  the 
great  modern  relativist,  Montaigne/  and  you 
have  his  exemplars  during  the  six  years  of 
reading  which  prepared  him  for  La  Vie  litte- 
raire. 

What  is  this  dilettantism  ?  It  is,  for  Anatole 
France,  "le  don  de  s'amuser  de  soi-meme."  It 
is  intellectual  Epicureanism:  "one  wearies  of 
everything  except  the  joys  of  comprehending." 
It  is  a  religion  of  universal  curiosity,  spiced  by 
erudition  and  guided  by  taste.  Skeptical  of 
absolute  values,  it  accepts  the  game  of  thought 
for  the  game's  sake,  and  it  builds  no  philo- 
sophic system.  Hence  its  inconsistencies,  its 
contradictions :  since  those  who  follow  the  great 
god  Mood  must,  like  Montaigne,  possess  two 
or  three  philosophies.  "Woe  unto  him  who 
does  not  contradict  himself  at  least  once  a  day," 
had  said  Renan.  Anatole  France  will  say,  in 
the  Preface  to  his  second  volume,  "I  am  afraid 
of  absolutely  logical  souls."* 

"  Breadth  extended  even  to  inconsistency  will 
hardly  be  dogmatic.  So  this  critic  builds  no 
theory  of  esthetics.  Artist  that  he  is,  com- 
pelled to  choose  because  all  art  is  selective,  he 
does  not  exalt  his  personal  preferences  into  a 

»  Vie  litt.  III,  passim. 

8  "Les  ames  exemptes  de  tout  illogisme  me  font  peur." 


87 

theory.  "I  believe  that  we  shall  never  know," 
says  he  in  a  preface,  "exactly  why  a  thing  is 
beautiful."  To  him,  "Beauty  is  a  part  of  the 
universal  illusion.  It  is  the  eye  of  man  which 
creates  the  beauty  of  the  heavens  and  the  earth. 
We  confer  beauty  upon  things  by  loving  them ; 
love  contains  all  the  mystery  of  the  ideal.  But, 
idealists  or  realists,  we  are  all  alike  the  play- 
things of  appearances ....  Beauty  is  the  only 
reality  we  are  permitted  to  seize." 

We  think  at  once  of  Plato's  Protagoras.  But 
all  the  philosophers  are  known  to  this  destroyer 
of  philosophy.  The  very  procession  of  the 
world-systems  has  made  him  more  skeptical: 
in  philosophy  too,  as  in  the  things  about  him, 
he  sees  only  relativity  and  change.  And  yet 
he  loves  philosophy  as  the  history  of  man's 
thought,  loves  it  as  a  scholar  and  a  humanist. 
For  him  as  for  Pascal,  "thought  is  man  in  his 
entirety,"  the  source  of  his  dignity  and  the 
secret  of  his  despair."  He  loves  it  also  as  a 
master  of  dialectics,  as  we  may  see  in  his  essay 
on  Jules  Lemaitre,  and  for  Anatole  France 
thought  is  philosophic  doubt. 

Let  us  see  what  he  has  to  say  of  his  fellow 
Renanist  Lemaitre — and  incidentally  of  him- 
self.    "His  fortunate  perversity,"   reads  the 

» III,  69. 


88 

essay,  "consists  in  doubting  incessantly.  'Tis 
the  condition  to  which  reflection  has  reduced 
him.  Thought  is  a  frightful  thing.  It  is  the 
acid  which  dissolves  the  universe,  and  if  all 
men  were  set  to  thinking  at  once,  the  world 
would  immediately  cease  to  exist.  But  this 
misfortune  is  not  to  be  feared.  Thought  is  the 
worst  of  things.  It  is  also  the  best,  for  if  it 
is  true  to  say  that  it  destroys  everything,  one 
can  also  say  that  it  has  created  all  things.  Only 
through  it  do  we  conceive  the  universe,  and 
when  it  demonstrates  to  us  that  the  universe  is 
inconceivable,  it  does  but  shatter  the  bubble  it 
has  blown."'" 

How  all  this  recalls  the  Dialogues  philoso- 
phiquesl  Only  Renan,  surely,  could  keep  his 
paradoxes  dancing  so  skilfully  upon  thin  air. 
Only  Renan,  before  him,  could  blow  them  so 
rich  in  color  and  beauty,  yet  light  as  thistle- 
down. To  juggle  with  ultimate  things  like  sil- 
ver balls — Renan  alone  had  done  that:  now 
that  skill  is  shared  by  Anatole  France  and  by 
his  mocking  Cyrenaic  Nicias,  whose  incarna- 
tion, in  Thais,  dates  from  this  very  year  ( 1889). 

So  from  Nicias's  creator  we  can  expect  noth- 
ing but  subjective  criticism.  "As  I  understand 
it,"  he  says  in  his  first  Preface,  "criticism,  like 

"  II,  173. 


89 

philosophy  or  history,  is  a  kind  of  novel  for  the 
use  of  curious  or  discreet  minds,  and  every 
novel,  correctly  speaking,  is  an  autobiography. 
The  good  critic  is  the  one  who  relates  the  ad- 
ventures of  his  soul  in  the  midst  of  master- 
pieces." For  Anatole  France,  indeed,  objective 
criticism  is  as  impossible  as  objective  art,  since 
we  are  all  of  us  prisoned  in  self,  unable  to  es- 
cape from  our  personalities.  Better  admit  the 
fact  then,  if  we  speak  at  all;  to  be  perfectly 
frank,  the  critic  should  say:  "Gentlemen,  I  am 
going  to  speak  of  myself  in  connection  with 
Shakespeare,  Racine,  or  Goethe.  'Tis  a  rather 
fine  opportunity." 

Was  this  denial  of  objective  truth  meant  for 
a  challenge?  At  any  rate  it  had  the  effect  of 
one,  and  the  glove  cast  down  by  Renan's  bril- 
liant disciple  was  picked  up  by  the  sturdiest 
intellectual  son  of  Taine.  To  name  Brunetiere 
is  to  describe  his  rejoinder,  delivered  in  the 
classic  pages  of  La  Revue  des  Deux-Mondes 
(January  i,  1891).  Mentor,  after  his  long 
labors  in  critical  scholarship,  of  that  bulwark 
of  literary  conservatism,  a  humanist  armed 
with  all  the  sledges  of  dialectics,  Brunetiere 
did  his  best  to  crush  this  dangerous  butterfly, 
this  dilettante  whose  sophistries  were  appar- 
ently aimed  at  scholarship  itself.    But  the  ham- 


90 

mers  only  swung  in  empty  air.  Brunetiere's 
attempt  to  refute  the  subjectivity  of  knowledge 
was  hardly  more  successful  than  those  of  all  the 
philosophers  before  him,  and  over  the  ruins  of 
his  logic  the  butterfly  hovers  still. 

Our  concern  moreover  is  with  the  butterfly. 
Let  us  keep  the  image,  for  it  alone  translates 
the  volatile  grace  of  these  literary  chats.  Such 
might  be  the  essays  of  Montaigne  reincarnate, 
a  Montaigne  turned  chroniqueur  parisien.  Like 
him,  like  Elia  too,  Anatole  France  follows  his 
fancy  where  it  listeth :  "je  cause,  et  la  causerie 
a  ses  hasards."  So  perfectly  natural  does  it 
seem  that  at  first  one  is  more  than  half  de- 
ceived. None  the  less,  chance  is  not  master 
here.  Well  does  this  critic  know  what  he  would 
say — or  leave  unsaid!  He  may  say  it  naively, 
but  ars  est  celare  artem.  He  always  says  it 
simply,  with  a  grace  borrowed  from  antiquity. 
True  to  his  mentor  Voltaire,  he  never  forgets 
that  he  is  writing  for  the  larger  public,  and 
these  years  of  newspaper  work  will  do  much 
to  make  his  prose  vivid  and  supple  and  sure. 

His  method — but  that  may  best  be  left  to  his 
own  words.  Renan  had  just  published  a  vol- 
ume of  his  great  history,  the  task  of  a  lifetime. 
Remember  Anatole  France  was  speaking  of  the 


91 

work  of  a  master — of  his  own  master.     And 
here  is  his  introduction: 

"Must  I  try  to  describe  for  you  the  impres- 
sion I  felt  in  reading  this  second  volume  of  The 
History  of  Israel  ?  Must  I  show  you  my  mood 
('I'etat  de  mon  ame')  while  I  was  dreaming 
from  page  to  page?  'Tis  a  sort  of  criticism 
for  which  I  have  only  too  much  inclination,  as 
you  know.  When  I  have  told  what  I  have  felt, 
I  can  hardly  ever  say  more,  and  all  my  art  is 
scribbling  on  the  margins  of  books.  A  leaf 
turned  over  is  like  a  torch  put  in  my  hand;  it 
sets  to  dancing  twenty  butterflies  which  spring 
from  my  brain ....  If  I  drive  them  away,  others 
come,  and  they  seem  to  murmur  with  their 
beating  wings:  *We  are  little  Psyches.  . .  .we 
too  are  seeking  Eros,  the  secret  of  life  and  of 
death.'  And  finally  it  is  always  one  of  these 
little  Psyches  who  writes  my  article  for  me! 
How  she  manages.  Heaven  knows,  but  without 
her  I  should  do  far  worse."" 

And  what  the  little  Psyches  bring  him  now, 
after  a  descriptive  paragraph  based  on  his  rev- 
erie over  Renan's  masterpiece,  is  the  memory 
of  his  mother's  Bible,  with  its  seventeenth- 
century  woodcuts,  and  these  occupy  him  almost 
to  the  exclusion  of  the  book  he  is  set  to  review. 

"  II,  317. 


92 

So  for  Anatole  France  criticism  becomes  a 
marginal  note.  It  is  a  gloss;  a  gloss  creative 
as  the  text  it  adorns.  La  Vie  litteraire  is  a 
journal  intime  of  literary  impressions,  of  gen- 
eral ideas — "it  is  so  agreeable  to  philosophize." 
It  is  a  portrait  of  the  artist;  and  if  he  has  no 
systematic  "tendency,"  tendencies  he  certainly 
has.  Breadth  first,  for  "one  has  less  chance  of 
being  absolutely  mistaken  when  one  admires 
things  which  are  very  diverse.""  Yet  he  insists 
upon  style,  the  simple  style  of  the  Greeks,  and 
he  hates  neologism  and  Goncourisme  as  he 
hates  the  platitudes  of  Georges  Ohnet  or  the 
monstrous  rhetoric  of  Victor  Hugo.  For  Ana- 
tole France,  as  for  his  beloved  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, taste  is  the  first  canon  of  literature: 
"Without  taste,  one  shocks  even  those  who 
have  none."^^  So  he  likes  the  tale  better  than 
the  novel,"  and  confesses  "a  secret  preference 
for  little  masterpieces.""  Taste  means  restraint : 
"To  tell  everything  is  to  tell  nothing."'®  Taste 
means  beauty,  and  "in  art  everything  which  is 
not  beautiful  is  false.""  Hence  his  chief  abom- 
ination is  naturalism,  and  nothing  could  be 
finer  than  the  conclusion  of  his  study  of  Zola," 

12  I,  99.  "  I,  17. 

"  IV,  319.  "  I,  ISO. 

18  I,  78.  "  I,  79. 
"1,236. 


93 

which  shows  us  that  even  a  skeptic  may  have 
ideals : 

"There  is  in  all  of  us ....  an  instinct  for 
beauty,  a  desire  for  all  that  adorns  and  beauti- 
fies, which,  diffused  throughout  the  world, 
makes  the  charm  of  life.  Monsieur  Zola  does 
not  know  it.  In  some  hearts  desire  and  mod- 
esty are  mingled  in  charming  nuances.  Mon- 
sieur Zola  does  not  know  it.  There  are  on 
earth  shapes  grandly  fair  and  noble  thoughts ; 
there  are  pure  souls  and  heroic  hearts.  Mon- 
sieur Zola  does  not  know  it.  Many  a  weakness 
even,  many  an  error  and  fault  has  its  touching 
beauty.  Grief  is  sacred:  the  holiness  of  tears 
lies  at  the  base  of  all  religions.  Unhappiness 
alone  would  be  enough  to  make  man  august 
to  man.  Monsieur  Zola  does  not  know  it.  He 
does  not  know  that  the  Graces  are  modest,  that 
philosophic  irony  is  indulgent  and  mild;  and 
that  human  affairs  inspire  in  noble  hearts  only 
two  feelings,  admiration  or  pity.  Monsieur 
Zola  is  worthy  of  profound  pity." 

Thus  ended  the  review  of  La  Terre.  Not  one 
digression  in  this  richly  deserved  critique,  and 
even  an  etymologist  could  call  it  one !  But  only 
two  years  later,  when  the  bankruptcy  of  nat- 
uralism was  assured,  we  find  Anatole  France 
speaking  generously  for  masterpieces  like  Ger- 


94 

minal,^^  whose  epic  force  had  impressed  him 
through  all  his  Hellenism.  This  recognition 
occurred  long  before  the  personal  rapproche- 
ment of  the  Dreyfus  affair. 

Of  course  his  antipathy  to  Zola's  naturalism 
is  what  we  should  expect  of  a  poet.  Classic 
naturalism,  so  finely  wrought  out  in  the  seven- 
teenth century,  he  accepts  as  a  humanist,  and 
he  loves  and  strives  for  the  classical  ideal  of 
form.  Yet  by  his  feelings  he  leans  to  the  ro- 
mantic— and  openly  avows  it.  "Despite  all  our 
attempts  to  be  reasonable  and  to  love  only  the 
truth,  there  are  times  when  common  reality 
ceases  to  satisfy — when  one  would  like  to  es- 
cape from  Nature."^"  As  Poe  had  said,  any- 
where out  of  the  world!  So  Anatole  France 
will  explore  the  cosmos  in  search  of  the  mar- 
velous— which  he  knows  does  not  exist! — and 
is  never  happier  than  when  illuminating  some 
miracle  of  popular  legend  or  medieval  hagiol- 
ogy  or  modern  spiritism.  With  the  same  ro- 
mantic curiosity  he  will  ransack  the  sciences, 
choosing  of  course  writers  "fond  of  those  gen- 
eralizations from  which  a  curious  mind  can 
draw  immediate  pleasure  and  profit."^^  How 
often,  for  instance,  will  his  restless  imagination 

"111,371.  20  1,117. 

21 IV,  350. 


95 

find  in  the  marvels  of  astronomy  a  new  thrill 
and  a  new  metaphor ! 

So  might  one  plunder  all  the  universe  to  store 
a  Palace  of  Art.  But  our  skeptic  knows  that 
"everything  in  this  world  must  be  paid  for,  and 
pleasure  most  of  all.""  Before  the  end  of  the 
second  volume,  we  find  hints  of  a  reaction,  a 
growing  desire  to  quit  his  ivory  tower.  Take 
the  page  in  which  he  depicts  the  farmers  win- 
nowing wheat — a  page  worthy  to  set  beside  the 
classic  prologue  of  La  Mare  an  diahle,  and 
mark  the  ending:  "Oh  the  joy  of  accomplishing 
a  fixed  and  regular  task!  Shall  I  know,  to- 
night, whether  I  have  brought  home  to  my 
granary  the  good  grain  ?  Shall  I  know  whether 
my  words  are  the  bread  which  giveth  life?"'^ 

There  is,  then,  an  ideal  of  truth,  an  ideal  for 
life,  unknown  to  him  though  it  be.  And  now, 
in  the  last  two  volumes  of  La  Vie  litter  aire,  a 
new  note  enters,  despite  the  rather  significant 
fact  that  personalia  come  less  readily  to  his  pen. 
This  note  is  first  struck  in  the  review  of  Bour- 
get's  Le  Disciple.^*"  Here,  Anatole  France  ve- 
hemently defends  the  right  of  the  thinker  to  a 
free  expression  of  his  thought,  regardless  of 
any  practical  or  moral  consequences.     "It  is 

22  I,  255.  23  II,  254. 

2<  III,  54. 


96 

thought  which  rules  the  world,"  he  avers,  "yes- 
terday's ideas  make  the  morals  of  to-morrow." 
And  if  he  still  loves  his  skeptical  poise,  still 
believes  with  Montaigne  that  "to  die  for  an 
idea  is  to  set  a  pretty  high  value  on  conjectures," 
none  the  less  he  does  virtually  deny  his  old 
quietism  in  this  statement:  "Whoever  thinks 
he  possesses  the  truth  must  declare  it.""  He 
knows,  now,  that  "life  is  not  innocent,"  as  he 
had  hoped  it  might  be,  that  "we  live  only  by 
devouring  life" ;  nay,  that  even  "thought  is  an 
act  which  partakes  of  the  cruelty  inherent  in 
every  act."^°  And  not  many  weeks  after  comes 
the  realization  that,  even  for  a  hedonist,  pas- 
sivity is  death.  Reviewing  the  career  of  a  for- 
gotten connoisseur,  Vivant  Denon,  he  tells  us 
that  "la  mollesse  est  I'ennemie  des  vraies  volup- 
tes";"  discovers,  even  more  significantly,  ''the 
defect  of  that  fortunate  career"  in  Denon's  re- 
fusal to  allow  himself  "to  take  up  arms  in  any 
cause." 

It  is  clear  that  these  two  essays  mark  the 
turning-point  in  the  development  of  Anatole 
France.  He  had  been  one  of  those  described 
in  his  first  Preface,  one  "for  whom  the  universe 
is  only  ink  and  paper."    Now,  his  window  open 

25  III,  62.  2«  III,  n. 

"  III,  179. 


97 

on  the  present,  a  living  breeze  has  destroyed 
his  quiet  and  his  quietism.  So  the  last  two 
volumes  of  the  essays  show  him  denying  his 
old  gods,  admitting  new  deities  into  his  Pan- 
theon. A  former  Parnassian,  he  now  derides 
"art  for  art's  sake,"  contending  that  "poetry 
should  spring  up  naturally  out  of  life,  like  a 
flower  or  tree."^*  He  admits,  with  restrictions, 
the  new  prosody  of  Jean  Moreas,  after  banter- 
ing the  symbolists  in  the  Preface  to  his  second 
volume!  He  proposes  for  the  College  de 
France  chairs  of  telepathy,  socialism,  and  phys- 
ical astronomy — to  study  the  canals  of  Mars.^* 
He  rallies  the  medievalist  Peladan  on  his  hatred 
of  patriotism  and  his  disgust  for  the  present.^** 
He  mocks  at  the  experimental  subjectivism  of 
Barres,  the  budding  depute,  maintaining  that 
"we  must  not  make  life  an  experiment,  we  must 
live  it."^^  For  the  third  time  he  returns  to  the 
defense  of  popular  writing:  "We  must  keep 
our  minds  wide  open  to  life  and  ideas."^^  And 
finally,  in  the  last  volume,  he  comes  out  boldly 
for  the  present  against  the  past,  affirming  that 
"never  has  there  been  an  age  more  interesting 
to  the  curious  mind,  except  perhaps  the  age  of 
Hadrian.'"^ 

28  III,  305.  29  IV,  58.  30  in,  235. 

31 IV,  229.  82  IV.  184.  33 IV,  165. 


98 

With  all  this  his  pessimism  increases  through 
these  later  volumes.  No  illusion  gilds  for  him 
the  present,  as  it  had  glorified  that  Palace  of 
Art  where  his  skepticism  had  found  peace  in 
books  and  in  "the  silent  orgies  of  thought."  He 
knows  this  world  of  ours  for  the  drop  of  mud 
that  it  is;  realizes  that  even  the  physical  uni- 
verse offers  no  hope  of  better  things.^*  He  finds 
it  horrible  to  think  that  children  will  become 
men/^  sees  that  the  unchanging  base  of  human 
nature  is  "tenaciously  selfish,  jealous,  sensual, 
and  cruel."^"  He  even  wonders,  at  times, 
whether  life  is  not  an  accident,  a  mould,  a 
planetary  disease."  And  believing  all  this,  dis- 
illusioned in  his  hopes  of  science,^*  in  his  belief 
in  history,^^  conscious  of  the  sadness  of  the 
everlasting  flux,*°  knowing  that  in  much  wis- 
dom is  much  grief,  he  asks  himself  every  even- 
ing with  the  Preacher,"  "What  profit  hath  a 
man  of  all  the  labour  which  he  laboureth  under 
the  sun?"  Yet  through  it  all  he  retains  his 
confidence  in  the  reason,  in  that  curious  eight- 
eenth century  which,  believing  in  progress  won 
through  reason,   inaugurated  a  new  era  for 

8*  III,  212.  »» III,  271. 

86 IV,  48.  "  IV,  229. 

88  IV,  43,  80  11,   116. 

*o  IV.  10.  •*!  II.  31. 


99 

humanity.*^  Only  his  first  trust  is  now  tem- 
pered by  experience,  by  the  realization  that 
"things  do  not  move  so  quickly  as  we  used  to 
think."  Convinced,  now,  that  ''one  must  follow 
circumstances,  use  the  forces  about  us,  do  in 
a  word  what  we  find  to  do,"*'  this  defender  of 
truth  in  the  abstract  is  only  waiting  for  the  hour 
and  the  call.  The  critic  who,  in  the  Preface 
of  four  years  before,  had  "blessed  books  be- 
cause they  made  of  life  a  long  and  gentle  child- 
hood," is  ready  for  his  anticlerical  campaign. 
Five  years  more,  and  he  will  fight  side  by  side 
with  Zola  in  the  defense  of  Dreyfus. 

« IV,  43. 
"  III,  348. 


CHAPTER  VI 


THE  DISCIPLE  OF  VOLTAIRE:  THE  ABBE  JEROME 
AND   FRA   GIOVANNI    (1893-95). 


VI 


4  i  /'"ANE  tires  of  everything,  even  of  correct- 
V_>/  ing  proof-sheets."  In  1892,  Anatole 
France  gave  up  his  regular  contributions  to 
Le  Temps,  and  his  later  occasional  work  in  this 
field  is  still  uncollected.  After  all,  literary 
journalism  had  been  mainly  a  pleasant  by-path 
for  his  curiosity,  since  the  years  from  1888  to 
1892  had  also  produced  Balthasar,  Thais,  and 
L'Etui  de  nacre.  Henceforth,  he  was  to  make 
fiction  the  vehicle  of  his  criticism  of  life. 

The  by-path  merges  into  the  highway  with 
L'Etui  de  nacre,  synchronous  with  the  last 
volume  of  essays.  Six  stories  in  that  collection 
were  staged  against  a  Revolutionary  setting. 
From  the  drama  back  to  the  comedy  which  pre- 
ceded it — from  1789  to  his  beloved  ancien  re- 
gime— was  no  long  step  for  one  who  so  ad- 
mired the  prose  of  Voltaire  and  the  liberal 
thought  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Hence  his 
next  book,  a  sort  of  conte  philosophique,  racy  as 


104 

Candide  and  filled  with  reminiscences  of  its 
characters  and  its  style. 

La  Rotisserie  de  la  reine  Pedauque  purports 
to  be  an  eighteenth-century  memoir,  written  by 
the  student  Jacques  Tournebroche.  His  father 
it  is  who  keeps  the  cook-shop  of  Queen  Web- 
foot,  with  its  painted  signboard  symbolic  of 
Mother  Goose, — a  redolent  hospitable  hearth 
where  gather  the  chief  characters  of  the  story. 
Here  we  find  the  Abbe  Jerome  Coignard,  hu- 
manist and  Bohemian,  unctuous  and  genially 
disreputable,  who,  for  a  daily  meal,  consents 
to  instruct  young  Jacques  in  the  humanities. 
Hither  comes  the  strange  figure  of  the  Marquis 
d'Astarac,  an  adept  of  alchemy  and  the  Rosy 
Cross,  to  point  out  in  the  flaming  fireplace  a 
salamander  suspiciously  like  Cellini's  vision — 
sure  portent,  to  him,  of  a  mystic's  destiny.  So 
Astarac  takes  Jacques  and  his  master  into  his 
service,  and  sets  them  to  work  in  his  library  to 
translate  Greek  manuscripts,  while  he  in  his 
laboratory  seeks  the  philosopher's  stone  and  the 
secret  of  life.  In  this  temple  of  learning  they 
meet  the  Rabbi  Mosaide,  who,  after  sixty  years 
of  study  in  the  Great  Pyramid,  explores  for  the 
alchemist  the  lore  of  the  Hebrews  and  the 
Egyptians :  there,  too,  they  meet  Jahel,  the  old 
Jew's  lovely  niece.    How  Jacques  mistakes  her 


105 

for  the  sylph  promised  him  by  Astarac,  how 
he  wins  her  love  and  loses  it  to  a  young  noble- 
man, how  student  and  master  are  obliged  to 
flee  Paris  with  the  lovers  because  their  drunken 
revel  has  ended  in  unintentional  homicide,  and 
how  at  last  the  beloved  Abbe,  struck  down  in 
purblind  jealousy  by  Mosaide,  expiates  his 
crime  by  a  Christian  death — all  this  must  be 
left  to  the  sprightly  pages  of  the  story, — a 
masterpiece,  although  not  virginibus  puerisque. 
Lovers  of  Voltaire  will  certainly  not  object  to 
the  necessity  of  seeking  the  original. 

La  Rotisserie  is  a  tale  of  the  marvelous — 
a  romance  of  alchemy  and  Rosicrucian  philos- 
ophy. Pope  had  used  the  same  theme  to  furnish 
the  mythology  of  The  Rape  of  the  Lock.  He 
says  in  his  Preface: 

"The  Rosicrucians  are  a  people  I  must  bring 
you  acquainted  with.  The  best  account  I  know 
of  them  is  in  a  French  book  called  Le  comte  de 
Gabalis.  . .  .According  to  these  gentlemen,  the 
four  elements  are  inhabited  by  spirits,  which 
they  call  sylphs,  gnomes,  nymphs,  and  sala- 
manders. The  gnomes,  or  demons  of  earth, 
delight  in  mischief ;  but  the  sylphs,  whose  habi- 
tation is  in  the  air,  are  the  best-conditioned 
creatures  imaginable ;  for  they  say  any  mortals 
may  enjoy  the  most  intimate  familiarities  with 


106    . 

these  gentle  spirits,  upon  a  condition  very  easy 
to  all  true  adepts,  an  inviolate  preservation  of 
chastity." 

Like  Alexander  Pope,  Anatole  France  found 
in  Le  comte  de  Gabalis  his  principal  source/ 
He  knew  this  contemporary  satire  of  the  Rosi- 
crucians  in  the  fascinating  Voyages  imaginaires 
(1788),  for  Monsieur  d'Astarac  is  sketched 
after  the  frontispiece.  In  the  same  volume, 
too,  may  be  found  an  Amant  salamandre ;  in 
the  next  one,  Cazotte's  Le  Diable  amoureux. 
But  more  to  us  than  these  details  is  the  roman- 
tic curiosity  which  led  a  skeptic  to  the  choice 
of  such  a  subject:  far  more  significant  is  his 
interest  in  the  scientific  possibility  of  invisible 
beings,  here  or  on  other  planets,  already  noted 
in  a  certain  page  of  La  Vie  litteraire.^  For  a 
poet-skeptic,  fascinated  by  the  supernatural,  "to 
believe  nothing  is  to  believe  everything" — in 
the  realm  of  art ! 

But  it  took  a  poet,  with  all  his  imagination 
and  candor,  to  limn  the  rational  madness  of  the 
alchemist,  despite  the  cosmic  curiosity  and 
naive  faith  in  science  which  make  of  him,  in  a 
way,  an  earlier  portrait  of  Anatole  France. 
Candor  alone  could  have  depicted  the  simple 

^  La  Grande  Revue,  Nov.  25,  1911. 
*  I.  186. 


107 

Jacques,  and  especially  the  pupil's  portrait  of 
his  friend  and  master  Jerome  Coignard.  The 
Abbe  Coignard  is  of  course  the  center  of  the 
story — a  mellow  rascal  who  through  all  his 
lapses  never  loses  our  sympathy.  In  his  fa- 
vorite book-shop  or  in  his  favorite  tavern, 
translating  Zosimus  or  mingling  potations  with 
philosophy,  he  is  always  genial ;  he  may  break 
a  wine-flask  over  a  lackey's  head,  but  when 
he  repents  of  this  moment  of  violence  he  is,  as 
always,  the  imperturbable  sage,  and  not  even 
the  accusation  of  cheating  at  cards  can  shake 
his  poise  or  spoil  his  subtly  intellectual  charm. 
We  love  him  for  his  humanity,  for  the  humani- 
ties whose  grace  he  breathes,  and  no  scene  in 
the  book  is  more  ludicrously  typical  than  the 
one  where  Abbe  Jerome,  who  has  fought  like 
a  layman  in  the  brawl  ending  a  Bacchic  sym- 
posium, is  found  sitting  on  the  wet  margin  of 
a  street  fountain,  cursing  the  moon  for  her 
stingy  light,  as  he  seeks  for  an  appropriate 
text  in  his  pocket  edition  of  De  Consolatione 
Philosophiae ! 

Of  course  the  Abbe  Jerome  is  the  mouth- 
piece of  his  "only  true  begetter."  Even  the 
disguise  is  significant,  for  who  can  sketch  a 
rascal  or  a  vagabond  so  well  as  your  cloistered 
scholar?     Intellectually,  Jerome  Coignard  is 


108 

Anatole  France,  a  mask  of  philosophic  dis- 
enchantment— Epicurus  with  the  heart  of  a 
Saint  Francis.  He  too  is  a  skeptic  in  practical 
life,  "with  a  marvelous  leaning  toward  doubt 
which  inclines  him  to  mistrust  even  common 
sense."  He  too  is  a  rationalist,  for  churchman 
that  he  is,  he  "rejects  everything  contrary  to 
reason  except  in  matters  of  faith,"  and  when 
he  adds  that  "here  one  must  believe  blindly," 
we  can  see  that  Anatole  France  is  attacking 
dogma  after  the  manner  of  Peter  Bayle  in  his 
great  Dictionary. 

After  dogma,  Christian  morality  has  its  turn. 
"Like  crows,  virtue  makes  its  nest  in  ruins," 
observes  the  good  Abbe.  "I  have  only  suc- 
ceeded in  smuggling  virtue  into  myself  through 
the  breaches  made  in  my  constitution  by  suffer- 
ing and  age.  And  every  time  I  tried  it,  too, 
my  spirit  was  puffed  up  far  less  with  virtue 
than  with  pride.  So  I  keep  making  to  the 
Creator  this  prayer :  'God,  keep  me  from  virtue, 
if  it  withdraw  me  from  holiness.'  Ah  holiness, 
that  is  the  thing  we  can  and  must  attain !  There 
is  our  true  goal.  May  we  reach  it  some  day! 
In  the  meantime,  more  wine!" 

Now  the  purpose  of  the  novel  is  revealed.  It 
is — rather  surprisingly  in  the  tolerant  skeptic 
of  the  essays — a  subtle  but  violent  anticlerical- 


109 

ism.  To  contrast  the  fixity  of  dogma  with  the 
experimentalism  of  a  pioneer  in  chemistry  is 
not  enough  for  Anatole  France ;  he  must  bring 
together  faith  and  skepticism  in  the  same  per- 
son. To  be  sure  he  had  known  a  priest  of  that 
type,  if  we  may  beHeve  a  page  in  the  second 
volume  of  La  Vie  litter  air  e^ — a  cleric  to  whom 
"everything  except  revelation  was  subject  to 
doubt."  He  had  been  attacked  by  the  Jesuits — 
les  petits  peres,  and  had  answered  them  iron- 
ically and  suavely,  on  page  two  hundred  and 
thirty-seven  of  the  third  volume.  But  this  is 
not  his  real  motive:  the  first  reaction  of  an 
exasperated  dilettantism  must  be,  inevitably, 
a  revulsion  against  the  rigors  of  dogma  and  the 
folly  of  the  ascetic  ideal. 

Turn  back  again  to  the  last  volume  of  the 
essays.  Just  such  a  reaction  is  presented  there, 
in  the  essay  on  Blaise  Pascal.  To  Anatole 
France,  skeptic  and  Epicurean,  Pascal  is  a 
"fanatic" :  a  zealot  who  neglected  all  the  human- 
ities of  life,  who  "despised  all  the  arts,  even 
that  of  writing,"  who  lived  in  filth,  found  sen- 
suality in  the  simplest  gastronomic  apprecia- 
tion, "rejoiced  at  the  death  of  his  relatives,  if 
only  that  death  were  Christian."  With  all  this 
Pascal  "kept  his  religion  and  his  philosophy  in 

3  Loc.  cit.,  p.  126. 


no 

watertight  compartments,"  fearing  that  reason 
might  enter  by  surprise  into  the  things  of  faith. 

Well!  Isn't  the  last  trait  parodied  for  us  in 
the  religion  of  Jerome  Coignard?  This  ration- 
alist, who  despises  the  vulgar  prejudice  conse- 
crated in  human  codes,  "adores  divine  law  even 
in  its  absurdities,  which  wound  our  reason  only 
because  they  are  above  it."*  And  Anatole 
France  is  evidently  following  Les  Lettres  pro- 
z'inciales  in  the  casuistry  of  the  good  Abbe,  who 
believes  that  the  greatest  sinners  make  the 
greatest  saints,  since  a  moment  of  contrition 
can  change  years  of  transgression  into  holi- 
ness/ To  use  this  as  a  justification  of  evil  is 
sufficient  proof  of  satiric  intention. 

In  externals,  of  course,  Coignard  resembles 
our  old  friend  Abbe  Prevost  or  the  Pangloss 
of  Candide.  But  in  spirit  he  is  a  new  Anatole 
France,  influenced  now  by  Voltaire  rather  than 
Renan.  Like  Voltaire,  Jerome  and  his  creator 
both  believe  in  reason ;  both  champion  that  free 
spirit  of  inquiry  which  alone  strips  respectabil- 
ity from  old  abuses.®  So  the  author  soon  added 
to  La  Rotisserie  a  companion  volume,  Les  opi- 
nions de  Monsieur  Jerome  Coignard,  declar- 
ing:^ *Tt  is  useful  to  wield  the  broom  a  bit 

*  Loc.  cit.,  pp.  156-7.  » Ibid.,  p.  160. 

«  Opinions,  p.  203.  '  Ibid.,  p.  29. 


Ill 

wildly  in  the  dark  corners ....  Things  unjust  or 
foolish  or  cruel  do  not  strike  us  as  familiar: 
we  see  the  faults  of  our  ancestors  and  not  our 
own."  Thus,  according  to  the  fictitious  editor, 
Les  Opinions  "should  help  us  to  examine  our 
own  consciences,  to  see ....  that  our  laws  are 
still  a  lair  of  injustice,  that  we  esteem  riches 
alone  and  do  not  honor  labor."  Reading  Les 
Opinions  in  the  light  of  to-day,  "our  social  sys- 
tem would  appear  what  it  really  is,  a  system 
precarious  and  wretched,  a  system  undermined 
by  the  justice  of  things  in  the  absence  of  human 
justice,  a  system  whose  ruin  has  begun." 

It  is  the  present  which  the  critic  is  now  strik- 
ing at — the  present  under  the  domino  of  the 
past.  For  the  Mississippi  affair  we  must  read 
the  scandal  of  Panama,  for  Rockstrong  the 
politician,  Rochefort.  In  fact,  the  whole  book 
is  a  livre  a  clef.  Here  begins  the  socialistic 
or  radical  tendency  in  Anatole  France,  but 
coupled  with  a  pessimism  so  deep  as  to  view 
any  projected  reform  of  society  with  alarm. 
As  he  sees  history,  no  human  progress  is  pos- 
sible: a  change  of  leaders  brings  to  the  front 
only  inexperience  and  greater  tyranny ;  a  revo- 
lution merely  consecrates  liberties  already  won. 
So  he  prefers  old  governments,  because  they 
are  weaker  and  more  tolerant;  all  the  advan- 


112 

tage  he  finds  in  democracy  is  the  fact  that  its 
shifting  bourgeois  ministries  can  never,  Hke  an 
absolute  monarchy,  combine  and  carry  out  a 
long-plotted  war.  And  to  him  war  is  a  relic  of 
man's  barbarism,  the  desire  to  kill  and  plunder 
which  he  shares  with  the  beasts.  "That  most 
frightful  plague  of  civilized  nations,  military 
service,"  he  views  as  a  monster  masked  in  false 
glory  and  false  honor ; — a  monster  grown  more 
cruel  with  the  progress  of  civilization  and  the 
increase  of  armaments,  and  destined  to  perish 
only  from  sheer  obesity  when  its  time  has  come. 

Equally  monstrous  to  him  is  the  idea  of  hu- 
man justice  and  capital  punishment.  The  very 
thought  of  an  execution  spoils  for  him  the  light 
of  day.  And  he  shows  that  all  law  is  based 
upon  the  respect  for  property — a  manifest  ab- 
surdity when  philosophy  teaches  that  man  has 
nothing  of  his  own  but  life  and  the  power  of 
thought.  Yet  he  has  no  faith  in  reform  through 
legislation,  no  confidence  in  the  return  to  nature 
or  the  natural  goodness  of  man.  'When  one 
wishes  to  make  men  good ....  one  is  inevitably 
led  to  wish  to  kill  them  all." 

A  sombre  pessimism,  in  fine,  colors  all  the 
opinions  of  Jerome  Coignard.  Once  he  be- 
lieved in  science,  like  Monsieur  d'Astarac, 
whose  joyous  atheistic  fatalism  sees  in  Nature 


113 

no  conflict,  no  contradiction,  since  "nothing 
exists  that  does  not  enter  into  the  march  of  her 
larger  Hfe."  Coignard,  however,  doubts  even 
experiment,  doubts  the  very  possibility  of  hu- 
man contribution  to  the  insensible  progress  of 
humanity.  Finding  in  science  nothing  but 
"spectacles  to  multiply  the  illusions  of  the 
senses,"  he  now  "hates  her  as  a  mistress  whom 
he  has  loved  too  much."  "I  used  to  wish  to 
know  everything,"  he  tells  his  pupil,  "and  to- 
day I  suffer  from  my  guilty  madness ....  I 
should  have  wrapped  myself  in  saintly  ignor- 
ance. . .  .An  immoderate  curiosity  dragged  me 
on,  my  son:  in  my  commerce  with  books  and 
scholars  I  have  lost  the  peace  of  heart,  the  holy 
simplicity  and  the  purity  of  the  meek.  . .  .But 
he  who  has  studied  in  books  has  ever  with  him 
pride  and  bitterness  and  despair." 

Then,  at  the  very  end,  comes  his  illumination. 
Unconsciously,  the  good  Abbe  falls  upon  the 
defect  of  the  critical  temper  in  the  eyes  of  an 
unreasoning  world.  "Tournebroche,  my  son," 
reads  the  last  page  of  Les  Opinions,  "you  see 
me  suddenly  become  uncertain  and  embar- 
rassed, tongue-tied  and  stupid  at  the  thought 
of  correcting  what  I  detest.  Don't  attribute 
this  to  timidity  of  mind;  nothing  surprises  the 
boldness  of  my  thought.     But  take  heed  of 


114 

what  I  say,  my  son:  truths  discovered  by  the 
intellect  remain  sterile;  the  heart  alone  is  able 
to  give  life  to  its  dreams.  . .  .It  is  by  feeling 
that  the  seeds  of  good  are  sown  in  this  world. 
Reason  has  no  such  power ;  and  I  must  say  that, 
hitherto,  I  have  put  too  much  reliance  on  rea- 
son. So  my  criticism  of  laws  and  customs  will 
fall  without  fruit  and  wither  like  a  tree  bitten 
by  April  frosts.  If  one  is  to  help  mankind,  one 
must  reject  reason  and  rise  on  the  wings  of 
enthusiasm." 

Anatole  France  has  plainly  fallen  under  the 
spell  of  romantic  humanitarianism. 

One  might  trace  the  beginning  of  this  in- 
terest in  certain  pages  of  La  Vie  litteraire.^ 
But  it  only  crystallizes  in  Le  putts  de  Sainte- 
Claire,  published  serially  this  same  year  in  the 
Echo  de  Paris.  For  the  simple  old  priest  whom 
we  meet  in  the  Prologue  is  not  merely  a  sort  of 
Abbe  Jerome  turned  Franciscan,  a  scholar 
grown  contemptuous  of  human  reason,  a  Chris- 
tian socialist  moved  to  mild  irony  by  the  comedy 
of  government,  justice,  and  militarism: — he  is 
a  dreamer  who  even  hopes  for  the  redemption 
of  the  Devil,  a  tender-hearted  dreamer  who 
longs  for  universal  peace  and  the  kingdom  of 
God  upon  earth.    It  is  this  modern  Saint  Fran- 

8  11,296;  III.  381;  etc. 


115 

cis  who,  on  the  margin  of  Santa  Clara's  well 
at  Siena,  relates  the  stories  which  make  up  Le 
puits  de  Sainte-Claire. 

These  tales  are  among  the  best  of  Anatole 
France.  With  a  new  mirror  of  refraction,  the 
old  fascinating  conflict  of  paganism  and  Chris- 
tianity finds  another  focus.  In  San  Satiro  is  re- 
lated the  temptation  of  the  poor  Franciscan 
Fra,  for  whom  a  pagan  tomb  gives  up  a  phan- 
tom rout  of  satyrs  and  elusive  nymphs,  trans- 
formed in  his  nightmare  into  toothless  hags. 
Tormented  by  his  vision  for  many  days,  the 
good  brother  comes  at  last  upon  the  ghost  of 
San  Satiro,  a  satyr  who  had  lived  with  the  first 
Galileans,  helped  them  and  served  them;  and 
whose  tomb,  consecrated  after  his  demise,  had 
become  sanctuary  for  a  myriad  of  pagan  wood- 
folk,  forgotten  deities  grown  tiny  and  light  as 
the  chafif  that  flies  before  the  winnowing-fan. 

The  story  is  full  of  touches  from  Apuleius. 
In  an  earlier  volume,  Anatole  France  had  once 
compared  the  Golden  Ass  to  the  legends  of  the 
Middle  Ages.®  There,  too,  he  had  announced, 
many  years  before,  the  theme  of  San  Satiro: 
"Up  to  the  Middle  Ages  the  monks  lived  in  a 
never-ending  spell."  But  here  the  whole  fairy- 
tale becomes  a  fable  of  the  eternal  passing  of 

»  Vie  litt.,  I,  121. 


116 

the  gods,  as  the  phantom  satyr-saint  tells  the 
poor  Franciscan,  before  he  dies  suffocated  by 
the  sponge  the  vengeful  witches  had  put  in 
place  of  his  heart. 

San  Satiro  thus  reminds  one  of  Pater's  Apollo 
in  Picardy.  The  fate  of  forgotten  deities  plainly 
fascinated  Anatole  France,  for  in  Messer  Guido 
Cavalcanti,  inspired  by  Boccaccio,  another  pa- 
gan tomb  gives  up  its  ghost  in  a  vision,  to  tell 
the  eager  young  humanist  that  in  the  grave 
there  is  no  knowledge  and  to  spur  him  on  the 
way  of  Learning.  But  later,  "seeing  that  the 
purest  souls  are  not  without  alloy  of  terrestrial 
passion,  Messer  Guido  is  seduced  by  the  am- 
bitions of  the  flesh  and  the  powers  of  this 
world,"  so  that  his  experience  of  life  may  be 
full,  and  he  may  die  knowing  that  "it  is  equally 
cruel  and  useless  to  think  and  to  act."  This 
disenchanted  disciple  of  Epicurus  was  evidently 
conceived  in  an  earlier,  darker  mood. 

Then  comes  a  story  suggested  by  Vasari. 
Lucifer  shows  the  danger  of  maligning  the 
Prince  of  Darkness,  for  the  luckless  painter 
who  had  caricatured  him  receives  in  a  dream 
the  Adversary  who  forsook  Heaven  in  order 
to  become  the  prince  of  this  world.  To  this 
Manichean  fantasy  succeeds  a  vaguely  social- 
istic parable,  the  story  of  a  selfish  banker  who 


117 

dreams  he  is  saved  because  of  a  casual  act  of 
charity — for  the  loaves  of  black  bread  he  had 
that  day  tossed  impulsively  to  the  poor. 

Le  joyeux  Buffalmacco  is  also  inspired  by 
Vasari.  But  this  tale  of  a  practical  joker,  so 
reminiscent  of  certain  pages  of  Boccaccio,  has 
little  esthetic  justification  in  the  volume,  unless 
it  be  for  the  half-suppressed  Rabelaisian  streak 
it  reveals  in  its  author.  Much  more  interesting 
is  La  dame  de  Verone,  a  bit  of  diabolistic  fan- 
tasy suggested  by  a  Latin  sermon,  or,  farther 
on  in  the  volume,  that  story  of  the  Blessed 
Catherine  which  puts  beside  it  a  sister  picture 
of  saintliness,  Le  mystere  du  Sang.  No  less 
graceful  are  the  other  brief  tales:  one  taken 
from  the  Miracles  of  the  Virgin,  one  from 
Brantome's  anecdote  of  love  and  vengeance, 
and  finally  one  built  upon  the  visit  of  Napoleon 
to  San  Miniato — a  strongly  contrasted  picture 
of  monastic  and  military  ideals. 

But  the  masterpiece  of  the  series  is  its  longest 
story,  L'humaine  tragedie.  In  Jerome  Coig- 
nard,  two  years  before,  Anatole  France  had  in- 
dicated his  own  return  from  universal  indul- 
gence to  a  militant  skepticism.  Then,  reliving 
in  art  an  age  of  ignorance  and  faith,  he  grew 
regretful  of  his  childish  belief,  glimpsed  again 
in  the  figure  of  Saint  Francis.    Now  he  must 


118 

justify  the  intellectual  curiosity  which  has  de- 
stroyed all  that,  in  order  to  console  himself  for 
its  loss.  Hence  the  "human  tragedy,"  the  story 
of  Fra  Giovanni  of  Viterbo. 

Humblest  of  Franciscan  friars,  the  playmate 
of  children  and  the  friend  of  beggars  and  lep- 
ers, fearing  to  think — "for  thought  is  evil" — 
Brother  Giovanni  knows  all  the  joys  of  lowli- 
ness and  ignorance ;  and  being  happy,  is  proof 
against  the  temptations  of  the  Adversary.  "For 
a  man's  thoughts  are  only  stirred  by  sorrow, 
and  his  meditations  by  grief.  Then,  tortured 
by  fears  and  desires,  he  turns  anxiously  in  his 
bed,  and  rends  his  pillow  of  lies." 

So  it  happens  with  this  simple-hearted  child 
of  God.  An  angel  touches  his  lips  with  a  burn- 
ing coal,  loosens  his  tongue  that  he  may  pro- 
claim the  Word  of  Life.  Fra  Giovanni  goes 
forth  to  preach  charity  and  poverty  and  hu- 
man brotherhood  on  earth,  talks  with  a  laborer 
and  comes  to  see  society  as  it  is,  ruled  by  op- 
pression and  property  and  trafficking — a  world 
in  which  the  poor  man  is  bound  to  defend  the 
good  things  belonging  to  the  rich.  He  declares 
the  iniquity  of  the  laws  and  is  cast  into  prison, 
but  he  consoles  himself  for  his  treatment  by 
the  thought  that  he  will  die  for  Truth.  Then 
One  appears  to  him  to  show  him  the  nature  of 


119 

that  Truth  for  which  he  would  die,  tells  him 
that  Truth  is  white  but  not  pure,  and  shows 
him  the  vision  of  a  vast  wheel,  like  the  rose- 
window  of  a  cathedral,  made  of  numberless 
moving  figures,  men  of  all  sorts  and  conditions, 
each  with  a  scroll  of  a  different  color  issuing 
from  his  lips.  Fra  Giovanni  reads  these  scrolls, 
various  in  matter  as  in  hue,  and  finds  among 
them  none  that  does  not  contradict  the  others, 
but  every  device  ends  in  the  words :  "Such  is  the 
Truth." 

And  while  he  sighs  at  their  contrariety,  mar- 
veling at  the  heretics  and  Arabs  and  Jews  and 
atheists  who  find  place  on  the  wheel,  seeking 
in  vain  one  scroll  of  white  to  console  him  for 
the  blood-red  motto  of  the  Pope: — when  he 
calls  at  last  for  pure  Truth,  the  Truth  for 
which  he  is  to  die,  behold!  the  wheel  begins  to 
revolve.  Faster  and  faster  it  turns,  until  the 
devices  show  only  as  circles,  until  the  circles 
themselves  disappear,  until  at  last  the  huge 
disk  looms  before  him  like  the  moon,  white  and 
stainless  and  dazzling.  And  he  hears  a  voice, 
crying:  "Gaze  now  upon  that  white  Truth 
which  you  wished  to  know." 

Thus  the  Devil  destroys  within  him  the  desire 
for  martyrdom.  Then  he  leads  the  prisoner 
away  with  him  to  the  hills,  gives  him  to  eat  of 


120 

the  Apple  and  reveals  to  him  the  beauty  and 
sadness  of  life.  Now  Fra  Giovanni  recognizes 
his  tempter  and  his  teacher,  but  knowing  that 
he  has  given  him  of  the  fruit  of  knowledge, 
taught  him  to  feel  and  will  and  suffer,  taught 
him  to  know  life  as  it  is,  his  heart  can  only  turn 
toward  his  teacher  in  gratitude  and  love. 

No  need  to  point  the  moral  of  this  epilogue, 
told  with  a  simplicity  and  a  depth  of  feeling 
which  prove  it  a  confession.  Plainly,  Anatole 
France  has  a  new  evangel  and  a  new  hero;  he 
has  been  touched  alike  by  humanitarianism 
and  by  the  moral  beauty  of  the  great  Franciscan. 
Now,  of  course,  his  radicalism — his  idealistic 
anarchism — is  wholly  theoretic.  If  like  Jerome 
Coignard,  the  Fra  affirms  that  law  is  not  cor- 
rected by  law,  he  also  says  that  it  is  not  reme- 
died by  the  destruction  of  law,  since  violence 
begets  violence  and  the  reformer  becomes  like 
the  judge  he  has  slain.  We  must  not  strike 
the  wicked,  lest  we  make  ourselves  like  them; 
we  must  oppose  to  force  not  force  but  gentle- 
ness. And  it  is  interesting  to  compare  the  Tol- 
stoyan  mildness  of  this  doctrine  with  his  later 
speeches,  when  the  Dreyfus  afifair  had  destroyed 
his  poise  and  made  him  an  active  enemy  of 
Church  and  army. 

Compared  with  Uhumaine  tragedie,  its  com- 


121 

panion  volume  of  1894  might  well  be  called  a 
step  backward.  Soul  and  senses — never  was 
contrast  drawn  so  sharply  as  between  these 
tales  and  the  troubling  pages  of  Le  Lys  rouge. 
It  must  have  been  several  years  on  the  loom, 
this  novel  which  takes  us  back  from  the  age  of 
faith  to  the  society  of  corrupt  sophistication. 
Instead  of  a  dreamer  who  feared  to  doubt,  we 
now  have  doubters  who  have  all  but  lost  the 
power  to  dream ;  against  the  purity  of  the  triple 
vow  we  have  the  theme  of  a  double  adultery. 
No  devil  in  Le  Lys  rouge,  but  in  his  stead,  dis- 
illusion, idleness,  and  the  emptiness  of  life  with- 
out a  task.  It  is  ennui  which  drives  the  heroine 
Therese,  cultured  and  sensuous  and  cynically 
positivistic,  to  leave  Paris  for  Italy,  leave  the 
commonplace  physical  bond  of  her  first  infidel- 
ity for  the  artist  whose  love  means  a  new  ne- 
penthe for  her  restless  desires.  Thus  the  back- 
ground of  the  story  connects  it  with  its  prede- 
cessor, Siena  being  changed  to  Florence,  whose 
adoptive  lilies  explain  the  puzzling  title.  At 
Santa  Maria  Novella,  at  the  convent  of  San 
Marco,  on  the  hill  of  Fiesole,  the  scene  is  already 
set  for  an  artist's  passion,  with  all  the  monu- 
ments of  a  noble  past  to  lend  their  beauty  to  the 
lover's  hour  of  joy. 

Indeed  this  background  is  decidedly  the  best 


122 

part  of  the  novel,  which  is  episodic,  digressive, 
and  lacking  in  unity  and  characterization.  Ex- 
quisite bits  of  landscape,  vistas  rich  in  a  double 
atmosphere  of  time  and  space,  sketched  in  a 
phrase,  yet  full  of  delicately  complex  beauty, 
gleam  and  tantalize  through  the  long  weary 
intrigue  of  love  and  jealousy;  and  one  carries 
away  the  vision  of  a  theater  more  precious  than 
the  comedy.  All  the  charm  of  mystic  Italy,  the 
Italy  of  Dante  and  Saint  Francis,  all  the  candor 
of  a  bygone  age,  relieves  the  pervasive  skepti- 
cism of  the  ultramodern  actors,  worthy  com- 
panions of  the  cynical,  disillusioned  Therese. 
Only  two  are  idealists,  the  sentimental  English 
poetess  enamored  of  Renaissance  art,  and  the 
vagabond  poet  Choulette,  dreaming  Catholic 
lyrics  and  preaching  Christian  socialism  in  the 
intervals  of  a  life  filled  with  debauch  and  re- 
pentance. But  Miss  Bell,  with  her  affected 
French  and  her  Preraphaelite  verses,  is  cer- 
tainly a  delicate  caricature  of  a  well-known 
English  blue-stocking;  and  in  Choulette,  the 
sinner-saint,  the  mad  weak  lovable  dreamer, 
every  reader  will  recognize  an  old  associate  of 
the  author — the  original  of  Gestas,  the  ineffable 
Paul  Verlaine. 

Now  and  again  Choulette  reminds  one  of 
Gerard  de  Nerval  or  Villiers  de  I'lsle-Adam. 


123 

He  has  something  too  of  Anatole  France.  His 
admiration  for  Saint  Francis,  his  sympathy 
with  the  lowly  and  outcast  of  society,  his  con- 
tempt of  human  laws,  "which  forbid  the  rich 
as  well  as  the  poor  to  sleep  under  bridges,  beg 
or  steal,"  are  all  traits  grown  familiar  before 
we  hear  them  on  this  satyr's  lips.  But  it  is  he 
who  remarks  that  "only  desire  and  idleness 
make  us  sad,"  who  tells  the  heroine  that  sensual 
love  is  alloyed  with  anger,  selfishness,  and  hate. 

This  perhaps  is  the  moral  of  the  story.  For 
after  Therese  wins  her  sculptor,  after  she  has 
learned  from  him  (like  Fra  Giovanni!)  "the 
delicate  joy  and  sadness  of  thought,"  she  loses 
him  because  of  her  former  sin.  And  the  book 
becomes  a  "psychology  of  jealousy" —  the  jeal- 
ousy of  a  morbid  sensitive  artist-mind,  crystal- 
lized in  the  despairing  cry  of  the  final  scene: 
"I  see  the  other  one  with  you  all  the  time." 

Therese  sums  up  a  philosophy  in  her  epigram, 
"Souls  are  impenetrable  to  souls."  Before  her. 
Jerome  Coignard  had  said  that.  But  one  must 
expect  to  find  the  same  phrases,  just  as  we  find 
the  same  ideas  on  art  or  literature  or  militarism, 
in  stories  born  from  a  subjective  mind.  Of 
course  the  mask  is  changed;  here  it  is  Paul 
Vence,  the  critic,  disciple  of  Renan  and  preacher 
of  irony  and  pity,  who  takes  the  place  of  the 


124 

Abbe.  Paul  Vence,  man  of  the  world,  skeptic 
and  author  of  a  socialistic  novel,  is  a  modern 
portrait  of  Anatole  France:  the  soiled  old  cas- 
sock had  only  been  the  picturesquely  satiric 
domino  of  his  first  venture  into  realistic  art. 

Thus  Le  Lys  rouge  marks  a  step  toward  the 
final  realism  of  L'Orme  du  mail.  First  of  his 
real  creations — for  his  'prentice  novels  are  imi- 
tative and  Sylvestre  Bonnard  a  wholly  subjec- 
tive figure — came  Balthasar  and  Thais,  purely 
romantic  as  the  Salammbo  of  Flaubert.  Grown 
broader  in  sympathy,  Anatole  France  created 
Jerome  Coignard,  a  product  of  that  inverted 
romanticism  which  finds  food  for  its  curiosity 
in  the  picaresque.  Then  he  portrayed  modern 
society,  not  as  the  pure  realist  or  naturalist  of 
Histoire  contemporaine,  but  as  an  idealist  who, 
reviewing  the  novels  of  "Gyp"  in  La  Vie  litte- 
raire,  had  looked  with  longing  on  the  delights 
of  this  world,  at  the  pageantry  of  life  among 
those  for  whom  life  is  in  itself  an  end.  Hence 
the  bitterness  of  his  story,  revealed  alike  in 
both  matter  and  manner  —  an  acrid  cynical 
after-taste  of  disillusion.  And  as  Gyp's  novels 
had  sent  him  back  to  his  study  content,  so  now 
he  draws  from  Le  Lys  rouge  its  own  lesson, 
the  lesson  which  he  gives  us  in  the  placid  pes- 
simism of  Le  jardin  d'Epicure. 


125 

It  were  unfair  to  attempt  a  summary  of  this, 
the  masterpiece  of  Anatole  France.  For  here 
are  gathered  his  finest  pensees,  the  best  of  all 
he  had  published  up  to  1894,  the  flower  of  his 
skeptical  reflection  on  life  and  the  world.  At 
fifty,  Anatole  France  draws  up  a  philosophic 
balance-sheet,  an  Epicurean  anthology.  It  is 
a  living  changing  album,  portraying  not  merely 
the  dilettante  of  La  Vie  litteraire,  not  merely 
the  skeptic  who  denies  all  science,  all  objective 
truth,  but  the  new  Anatole  France,  alive  to  the 
world's  injustice,  curious  of  a  future  in  which 
he  would  like  to  believe.  For  certainly  the 
scholar  is  now  interested  in  humanity  as  well 
as  the  humanities.  Now  he  admits  that  we 
live  too  much  in  books,  that  life  is  action  and 
that  "even  the  pleasures  of  the  intellect  begin 
only  when  one  sees  their  relation  to  life  and 
one's  fellow-men."  Now  he  knows  that  life  is 
worthless  if  we  do  not  live  it,  that  there  is  no 
innocence  in  renouncing  action,  that  thought 
itself  is  an  act ;  and  his  smiling  fatalism  is  tem- 
pered by  a  gleam  of  hope.  Like  Nietzsche,  he 
would  hope  "not  in  humanity,  but  in  those  in- 
conceivable creatures  which  will  some  day 
spring  from  man,  as  man  himself  has  sprung 
from  the  brute.  Let  us  put  our  hope  in  them, 
let  us  hope  in  that  travail  of  the  universe  which 


126 

finds  its  physical  law  in  evolution.  For  this 
fruitful  travail  we  can  feel  increasing  in  our 
own  breasts,  keeping  us  marching  toward  a 
goal  inevitable  and  divine." 

So  the  philosopher  of  the  Palace  of  Art  is  at 
last  resigned  to  living.  Without  illusions  as  to 
his  importance,  for  like  Jerome  Coignard  he 
does  not  exempt  himself  from  the  irony  and 
pity  he  would  accord  to  men,  Anatole  France 
is  now  ready  to  take  up  his  task,  to  add  his 
imperceptible  share  to  the  unknown  future. 
Like  Candide,  he  will  henceforth  "cultivate  his 
garden."  And  this  resignation  is  no  coward's 
virtue.  Through  all  the  bitterness  of  doubt, 
in  a  universe  filled  with  evil,  Anatole  France 
calmly  rears  his  pyre  of  hopes  beneath  the 
empty  sky,  snatching  from  pessimism  itself  a 
torch  of  courage,  a  torch  which  burns  with 
gloomy  magnificence  through  the  black  nihilism 
of  Le  jardin  d'Epicure. 


CHAPTER  VII 


THE  IRONIC  REALIST:  PROFESSOR  BERGERET 
AND  THE  "AFFAIR"   (1897-1901). 


VII 

THE  year  1896  brought  no  new  volume 
from  the  now  famous  Anatole  France. 
This  was  a  year  of  golden  silence,  crowned  by 
an  event  which  must  have  amused  the  critic 
who  had  rallied  the  fallibility  of  the  Academy 
in  Les  Opinions  and  Le  jar  din  d' Epicure.  One 
of  the  forty  had  just  died,  the  builder  of  the 
Suez  Canal,  the  famous  and  unfortunate  Fer- 
dinand de  Lesseps.  In  the  election  which  fol- 
lowed, the  conservatives  gave  their  suffrage 
to  the  future  radical  and  socialist,  electing 
him  over  the  anticlerical  candidate  Ferdinand 
Fabre.  An  Immortal  now — immortal  in  spite 
of  his  skepticism — Anatole  France  may  hence- 
forth mingle  with  the  affairs  of  men.  For 
every  schoolboy  knows  that  emotion  and  action 
are  the  rights  of  the  immortals. 

So  Anatole  France  came  down  to  earth,  to 
-the  world  of  to-day.     Almost  immediately  he 


130 

published  VOrme  du  mail  and  Le  Mannequin 
d'osier,  the  first  two  volumes  of ^a  series  called 
Histoire  contemporaine.  This  is  not  a  history ; 
it  is  not  even  a  story;  it  is  a  chain  of  episodes 
and  conversations  bearing  on  vital  questions 
of  the  day.  First  written  week  by  week  for  a 
newspaper,  then  gathered  into  books  like  the 
four  volumes  of  essays,  these  scenes  of  con- 
temporary manners  have  every  quality  except 
a  plot;  each  chapter  stands  by  itself,  a  "slice 
of  life"  which  is  also  a  criticism  of  life.  Begun 
as  journalism,  the  work  became  a  new  form 
of  fiction;  and  no  four  volumes  bound  down 
to  a  plot  could  have  painted  this  living  pano- 
rama of  provincial  prejudice  and  dulness  and 
petty  intrigue.  Published  while  the  events  it 
satirizes  were  going  on,  it  is  not  merely  real- 
ism: it  is  actualism — life  dissected  in  the  mak- 
ing. A  bitter  impassive  irony — the  irony  of 
Flaubert — runs  through  this  series  of  contem- 
porary drawings,  etched  deeply  as  by  some 
new  aqua  fortis,  gloomy  as  Zola  but  lifted  far 
above  him  by  selective  vision,  universality,  and 
style.  Zola  had  ignored  half  of  life,  sunk  the 
mind  in  the  body:  here  we  have  both  sides  of 
man's  existence,  and  even  sensation  becomes 
material  for  subtly  ironic  thought. 

This  picture  of  provincial  life  is  largely  a 


131 

group  portrait  defined  in  dialogue.  All  classes 
are  presented,  from  the  archbishop  and  the 
prefect  down  to  the  cobbler  and  the  vagabond 
— a  kaleidoscope  of  prejudice  and  selfishness 
dissolving  into  absurdity  at  each  turn  of  the 
author's  hand.  Only  petty  interests  absorb  this 
community,  where  intellectual  stagnation  views 
with  suspicion  all  those  who  submit  its  tradi- 
tions and  its  prejudices  to  reason.  But  if  the 
events  described  are  trivial,  they  are  pregnant 
with  meaning  for  the  student  of  French  his- 
tory. Indeed  it  is  not  impossible  that  future 
research  may  find  in  Histoire  contemporaine 
the  most  valuable  of  the  works  of  Anatole 
France. 

What  are  the  portraits  in  this  unintentional 
masterpiece?  First  the  clerics:  around  the 
corner  always  lurks  a  cassock.  There  is  the 
diplomatic  archbishop,  a  man  of  the  world  who 
entertains  state  dignitaries  with  game  pur- 
chased from  a  poacher.  There  is  the  papal 
nuncio,  a  passionless  automaton,  receiving  the 
rival  candidates  with  the  same  questions,  the 
same  replies.  There  is  the  retired  army  chap- 
lain, who  sees  the  ruin  of  the  military  virtues 
in  the  decline  of  faith ;  there  is  the  young  priest 
infatuated  with  hunting,  and  the  old  priest 
madly  eager  to  get  into  print.     But  it  is  the 


132 

contest  for  the  bishop's  ring,  running  through 
three  volumes  in  a  brilHant  series  of  vignettes, 
which  gives  us  the  best  of  these  clerical  por- 
traits :  Lantaigne,  the  superior  of  the  Seminary, 
and  his  rival  Guitrel.  Sturdy,  orthodox,  and 
fiery,  Lantaigne  is  the  type  of  the  uncomprom- 
ising cleric:  his  character  is  painted  in  his 
dismissal  of  a  favorite  pupil  suspected  of  weak- 
ness of  faith.  Against  him — symbol  of  the 
inhumanity  of  virtue — plots  the  Abbe  Guitrel, 
tactful  and  shrewd  and  dissimulating,  traf- 
ficking in  influence  as  he  traffics  in  vestments 
to  deck  the  parlors  of  the  Jewish  prefect's  wife. 
For  this  is  the  way  he  lays  the  foundations  of 
his  future  bishopric,  winning  the  favor  of  Caesar 
by  rendering  to  him  the  things  that  are  not  his. 
The  curio-hunting  Jewess,  who  sends  her 
daughter  to  a  Catholic  convent,  is  a  portrait 
worthy  of  Flaubert;  so  too  is  the  oily,  jovial 
Prefect.  Flaubert  hated  Homais:  Anatole 
France  despises  Worms-Clavelin,  who  "listens 
with  his  mouth,"  hates  this  politician  who, 
contemptuous  of  creeds  as  of  parties,  remains 
an  anti-Semite  and  a  turncoat  and  an  expedien- 
tist  to  the  end. 

Thus  Jew  and  Christian  alike  are  held  up 
to  ridicule.  There  is,  however,  a  distinctly 
friendly  touch  in  the  portrait  of  Lantaigne. 


133 

Human  if  not  humane,  with  something  of  Pere 
Didon's  interest  in  science  and  modern  Hfe/ 
the  vigorous  Father  Superior  wins  our  sym- 
pathy by  his  intellectual  honesty  and  strength. 
Under  the  elm-tree  on  the  mall  {VOrme  du 
mail),  he  talks  with  Professor  Bergeret,  calmly 
agnostic  but  fond  of  general  ideas  like  himself ; 
they  discuss  the  relativity  of  truth,  the  inspira- 
tion of  Joan  of  Arc,  democracy  and  militarism ; 
and  the  reader  discovers  in  the  pessimistic 
Bergeret  the  third  incarnation  of  Anatole 
France.  Skeptical  of  the  Absolute  and  the 
supernatural,  doubtful  of  human  progress,  Ber- 
geret is  not  yet  a  reformer:  he  finds  the  Re- 
public tolerant,  easy  to  live  under,  careless  of 
military  glory  and  too  variable  to  plot  a  world 
war.  So  Bergeret  is  a  passive  critic,  judging 
the  present  in  the  light  of  human  experience 
and  his  own  pessimism.  At  Paillot's  book-shop, 
where  he  occupies  one  of  the  academic  chairs 
in  the  second-hand  book  corner,  gather  Ber- 
geret's  other  auditors,  conservative  or  radical : 
and  here  he  draws  from  the  murder  committed 
next  door  a  placid  commentary  on  man's  nat- 
ural ferocity  and  war's  legalized  carnage.  Here 
too  he  meets  the  old  Chief-justice,  so  confident 
in  the  infallibility  of  legal  procedure,  whose 

1  Vie  Hit.,  IV,  100. 


134 

life  story  stirs  the  usually  unruffled  scholar  to 
an  expression  of  horrified  doubt.  Clearly,  the 
author  of  this  chapter  has  already  taken  sides 
in  the  Dreyfus  affair.  Another  judge,  brave 
enough  to  condemn  three  "anarchists"  for  the 
circulation  of  pamphlets  preaching  universal 
brotherhood,  typifies  that  intolerance  of  free 
thought  and  free  speech  from  which  Anatole 
France  is  soon  to  suffer  with  the  ironic  pro- 
fessor. 

For  Bergeret  does  suffer.  As  a  critic  of  con- 
temporary politics,  assailing  the  triple  domina- 
tion of  priest,  soldier,  and  financier,  he  is  hated 
by  Republicans  and  Clericals  alike.  Timid  and 
untactful,  he  suffers  in  his  university,  making 
enemies  of  his  rector  and  his  dean.  And  with 
all  this  he  suffers  in  his  home,  having  married 
the  wife  so  often  chosen  by — or  choosing — ^his 
kind.  Practical,  uneducated,  and  proudly  ig- 
norant, his  Xantippe  sees  in  her  lord  only  a 
weak  incapable  dreamer,  and  as  she  does  not 
understand  him,  she  has  always  despised  him. 
Finally,  she  treats  him  as  Venus  did  Vulcan — to 
borrow  the  euphemism  of  a  French  critic,  re- 
gardless of  her  matronly  unfitness  to  play  the 
role  of  the  Cytherean  queen. 

The  Vulcanization  of  Monsieur  Bergeret  is 
the  chief  episode  of  the  second  volume  of  the 


135 

series,  Le  Mannequin  d' osier.  The  "wicker- 
work  woman"  is  the  dummy  upon  which  Ma- 
dame Bergeret  drapes  her  dresses,  shoved  out 
of  the  way  into  the  professor's  damp  and  dismal 
study.  Headless  and  heartless  it  stands  against 
the  well-worn  backs  of  his  Latin  poets,  a  wooden 
lady,  a  hymeneal  symbol.  To  this  study  comes 
the  young  soldier  and  former  pupil  who  serves 
as  Mars  in  the  story :  and  Bergeret  here  deals 
his  thrusts  at  militarism  and  that  folly  of  arma- 
ments which  must  end  only  in  war  or  bank- 
ruptcy. Madame  Bergeret  enters,  and  the  scene 
that  follows  clamors  for  quotation : 

"Monsieur  Roux  removed  Freund's  Diction- 
ary from  an  old  armchair  and  gave  a  seat  to 
Madame  Bergeret.  Monsieur  Bergeret  con- 
templated in  turn  the  quartos  pushed  against 
the  wall,  and  Madame  Bergeret  who  had  taken 
their  place  in  the  armchair,  and  reflected  that 
these  two  groups  of  matter,  differentiated  as 
they  then  were  and  so  diverse  in  appearance, 
nature,  and  use,  had  presented  an  original 
similarity — a  similarity  long  maintained,  when 
both  the  dictionary  and  the  lady  were  still  float- 
ing in  a  gaseous  state  in  the  primitive  nebula. 

"  Tor  after  all,'  he  said  to  himself,  'Madame 
Bergeret  floated  about  in  the  infinite  of  time, 
shapeless,  unconscious,  diffused  in  flickering 


136 

gleams  of  oxygen  and  carbon.  The  molecules 
which  were  to  make  up  this  Latin  dictionary, 
circled  at  the  same  time,  for  ages,  in  this  same 
nebula,  which  was  to  bring  forth  monsters,  in- 
sects, and  a  little  thought.  It  has  taken  an 
eternity  to  produce  my  dictionary  and  my  wife, 
monuments  of  my  painful  existence,  creations 
defective  and  at  times  annoying.  My  dictionary 
is  full  of  mistakes.  Amelia's  coarse  body  con- 
tains an  even  coarser  soul.  That  is  why  we  can 
scarcely  hope  that  a  new  eternity  will  some 
day  create  Knowledge  and  Beauty.  We  live 
for  a  moment  and  we  should  gain  nothing  by 
living  forever.  It  is  neither  time  nor  space  that 
Nature  lacks,  and  we  behold  her  handiwork!' 

"And  Monsieur  Bergeret  still  asked  his  rest- 
less soul:  'But  what  is  time,  except  the  very 
movements  of  Nature,  and  can  I  say  that  they 
are  long  or  short?  Nature  is  cruel  and  com- 
monplace. But  whence  comes  it  that  I  know 
it?  And  how  can  I  stand  outside  of  Nature 
to  know  her  and  to  judge  her?  I  might  have 
a  better  opinion  of  the  universe  if  I  held  a  dif- 
ferent place  in  it.'" 

That  is  Bergeret's  portrait,  painted  by  him- 
self. Disillusion  and  irony  have  drawn  the 
lips,  but  the  eyes  are  restless,  and  the  brows 
intent  upon  the  eternal  question.     His  is  no 


137 

longer  a  placid  pessimism.  He  knows  that 
man  is  a  bete  malfaisante,  but  he  would  also 
learn  why  he  knows  it  and  whence  come  his 
pain  and  indignation.  "For  if  evil  alone  ex- 
isted man  would  not  see  it,  as  the  night  would 
have  no  name  in  the  absence  of  dawn." 

To  this  portrait  we  must  add  the  reflections 
of  Monsieur  Bergeret  after  he  has  discovered 
his  betrayal,  with  its  masterly  analysis  of  his 
incapacity  to  act  his  part  in  the  tragicomedy. 
Through  suffering  and  self-analysis  he  falls 
at  last  upon  the  origins  of  modesty — a  spiritual 
experience  at  once  comic  and  terribly  realistic 
as  any  page  of  Bourget  or  Stendhal.  Nowhere 
is  the  man  of  books  so  pitilessly  presented  to  a 
world  of  action ;  yet  Bergeret  wins  his  ends  by 
the  very  passivity  of  his  revenge.  He  ignores 
his  impenitent  wife,  meets  her  unseeing  as  a 
ghost,  makes  her  doubt  her  own  existence  in  his 
absolute  disregard.  And  at  last  she  leaves  the 
husband  whose  timidity  has  evolved  a  ven- 
geance so  ludicrous  and  so  effective. 

"Vivre  c'est  detruire.  Agir  c'est  nuire."  So 
Bergeret  finds  that  his  abstention  from  action 
is  itself  a  force  that  hurts,  and  realizes,  with 
comic  pride,  that  he  too  is  a  destructive  animal 
in  a  world  of  carnage.  Soon  he  will  know  that 
even  thoughts  are  acts,  may  become  acts:  all 


138 

the  antimilitarism  of  the  book  prepares  us  for 
his  stand  in  the  Dreyfus  case.  How  deft  his 
thrusts  at  the  simpHcity  of  the  soldier,  the  bait 
of  the  uniform,  the  illusion  of  glory  so  carefully 
kept  up  by  the  State.  *'The  least  we  can  do  is 
to  flatter  those  whom  we  send  out  to  be  shot." 
How  bitter  his  denunciation  of  the  military 
code,  the  court  martial,  "fit  only  for  a  chamber 
of  horrors  in  a  museum."  A  pacifist,  he  can 
hope  only  that  war  may  be  staved  oflf  by  the 
mediocrity  of  cabinets  or  the  greed  of  High 
Finance.  "A  socialistic  Europe  will  probably 
be  friendly  to  peace.  For  there  will  be  a  social- 
istic Europe,  Monsieur  TAbbe,"  says  he  to 
Lantaigne,  "if  indeed  we  may  call  socialism 
that  unknown  power  which  is  approaching." 
Evidently  Bergeret  has  changed — like  Ana- 
tole  France!  In  his  universal  curiosity  the 
scholar  has  left  his  study,  now  and  again,  for 
the  streets,  and  in  the  streets  he  has  seen  the 
life  of  the  unfortunate  and  the  oppressed.  And 
he  has  not  seen  the  injustice  of  it  unmoved. 
Hence  the  social  pity  in  the  brilliant  sketch  of 
the  wayfarer  Pied  d'Alouette,  the  pity  and 
irony  combined  in  the  portrait  of  the  cobbler 
Piedagnel.  Only  a  living  experience  could  have 
written  these  chapters ;  a  heart  once  thrilled  by 
the  story  of  Saint  Francis  here  touches  life  it- 


139 

self,  to  draw  from  its  bleeding  core  a  lesson  of 
universal  love. 

The  professor's  spectator-phase  is  ending. 
Bergeret  does  not  adopt  a  party,  range  himself 
with  the  anticlericals  of  his  sympathies,  for 
he  knows  that  parties  and  party  disputes  are 
useless,  that  nothing  matters  to  the  State  so 
much  as  the  conditions  under  which  its  citizens 
live.^  But  events  in  France  are  forcing  him 
to  enter  a  party.  The  Affaire  Dreyfus  had  just 
shown  the  enormous  power  of  the  army ;  it  had 
revealed  the  injustice  of  the  army's  code.  Ac- 
cused of  selling  military  secrets  to  Germany,  a 
young  captain  of  artillery  had  been  condemned 
behind  closed  doors  by  a  court  martial;  and 
now,  after  a  public  degradation,  was  paying 
in  exile  for  the  honor  of  the  army  and  the  mis- 
fortune of  his  Jewish  birth.  As  usual,  the 
country  was  "betrayed,"  and  at  first  no  one 
questioned  the  justice  of  the  verdict.  But  Drey- 
fus's  friends  were  active  and  did  not  rest  until 
they  had  interested  the  public  in  this  violation 
of  human  rights.  Hence  the  constant  satire  of 
the  military  code  in  Histoire  contemporaine. 
Published  in  an  anti-Dreyfusard  journal 
(L'Echo  de  Paris),  these  pages  still  moulded 
opinion:  intelligent  readers  knew  how  to  take 

2  op.  cit.,  p.  316. 


140 

their  ironic  detachment,  and  even  the  literal 
might  here  read  both  sides  of  the  question  in- 
volved. 

Meanwhile,  the  heroic  Colonel  Picquart  had 
tried  to  reopen  the  case,  only  to  be  sent  to  Tunis 
for  his  pains.  Scheurer-Kestner,  vice-president 
of  the  Senate,  had  also  failed.  Esterhazy,  sus- 
pected by  Picquart,  was  triumphantly  white- 
washed; Picquart  was  arrested,  and  Emile  Zola 
published  on  the  thirteenth  of  January,  1898, 
his  charge  against  the  judges  of  Dreyfus  and 
Esterhazy.  Even  this  daringly  brilliant  letter, 
whereof  every  paragraph  begins  "J'accuse,^^ 
failed  of  immediate  effect:  Zola  was  con- 
demned: the  Minister  of  War  brought  forth 
new  "proofs,"  got  the  Chamber  of  Deputies  to 
ratify  the  judgment  of  the  court  martial;  and 
when  Picquart  declared  that  these  so-called 
proofs  were  irrelevant  and  false,  he  found  him- 
self arrested  again. 

Then  came  the  confession  of  the  original 
forgery  by  Colonel  Henry,  successor  to  Pic- 
quart on  the  General  Staff.  Esterhazy  now 
confessed:  he  had  forged  the  first  "evidence" 
used  against  the  victim.  Thereupon  the  Court 
of  Cassation  annulled  the  decision  of  the  court 
martial  and  ordered  a  second  military  trial, 
which  began  at  Rennes  in  August,  1899.    The 


141 

honor  of  the  army  was  saved;  Dreyfus  was 
declared  "guilty  with  extenuating  circum- 
stances"— a  verdict  which  would  be  laughable 
if  it  were  not  tragic.  Nor  did  the  pardon  of 
President  Loubet  help  matters:  Dreyfus  and 
his  party  claimed  exoneration.  But  laws  were 
passed  to  prevent  reopening  the  case,  and  it  was 
not  until  six  years  later  that  the  Court  of  Cas- 
sation revised  the  verdict  and  Dreyfus  was  re- 
instated in  the  army. 

Many  will  remember  the  echoes  of  this  drama, 
which  resounded  over  the  civilized  world.  In 
France,  in  Paris,  it  was  a  veritable  explosion. 
Party  feeling  flamed  high;  not  since  the  days 
of  the  Commune  had  the  city  seen  such  a  con- 
flagration. Dreyfusards  everywhere  were  de- 
nounced as  traitors  to  their  country.  The  last 
two  volumes  of  Histoire  contemporaine  show 
how  this  storm  of  hatred  spread  through  the 
provinces,  even  to  the  stagnant  little  city  of 
this  satiric  comedy,  even  to  the  peace-loving 
heart  of  Professor  Bergeret.  And  in  the  suf- 
ferings of  this  partisan  of  justice,  in  his  fero- 
cious pessimism  and  sarcastic  irony,  we  may 
read  the  sufferings  of  Anatole  France,  who 
from  the  beginning  stood  with  Zola  and  his 
little  band    of  intellectuels,  to  denounce    the 


142 

methods  of  the  court  martial  and  defend  Drey 
fus. 

L'Anneau  d'amethyste  first  presents  us  to  the 
anti-Dreyfusards.  From  the  very  beginning 
they  declare  themselves :  Guitrel,  the  abbe ;  the 
Royalist  and  anti-Semite  Due  de  Brece;  Le- 
rond,  the  ex-judge,  now  pleading  for  the  con- 
gregations ;  and  the  old  general  whom  we  have 
already  met  in  active  service  at  his  desk,  com- 
manding an  army  of  soldiers  in  his  neat  boxes 
of  name-cards.  Not  one  but  condemns  Dreyfus, 
and  with  him  all  the  traitors  who  call  for  re- 
vision; not  one  but  thinks  these  "Freemasons, 
anticlericals,  and  Jews"  the  real  enemies  of 
France.  This  is  the  litany  we  hear  in  the  chapel 
of  the  Catholic  Duke,  in  his  chateau  where 
black-robed  ladies  knit  beneath  the  portraits  of 
their  ancestors  and  the  princes  of  the  Bourbon 
line:  and  even  the  fair  Jewish  widow  of  the 
neighboring  estate,  so  eager  to  enter  this  aris- 
tocratic circle,  shares  the  anti-Dreyfusard  vio- 
lence of  her  wild  soldier  lover.  Under  her  roof 
reappears  Guitrel,  still  pulling  wires  for  his 
bishopric;  and  there  we  meet  her  crafty,  ego- 
istic, degenerate  son.  Now  a  new  thread  is 
brought  into  the  weft,  for  this  little  Jew  wants 
le  bouton  des  Brece, — the  coveted  button  which 
will  admit  him  to  the  hunting  parties  of  the 


143 

Duke ;  and  to  obtain  it  he  must  promise  to  sup- 
port the  Abbe.  Then  the  story  returns  to  Mon- 
sieur Bergeret,  and  we  leave  realism  for  a  while 
to  listen  to  a  philosopher. 

Freed  at  last  from  his  wife,  Bergeret  would 
resign  himself  to  life  as  it  is.  But  his  reverie 
on  Hercules  is  a  parable  on  that  Force  Incar- 
nate to  which  Europe  bows;  all  his  utterances 
in  the  academic  book-shop  condemn  secret  trials 
and  class  justice  and  judicial  infallibility.  And 
since  his  attitude  provokes  general  reprobation, 
since  he  is  left  alone  in  his  martyrdom,  his  good 
housekeeper  bethinks  herself  of  bringing  to  her 
master  a  stray  dog,  in  the  hope  that  he  may 
lighten  the  scholar's  loneliness.  Not  to  spoil 
by  quotation  this  delightful  chapter,  the  half- 
discouraged  professor,  "qui  n'etait  pas  triste," 
makes  acquaintance  with  Riquet,  through  an 
accident  which  reveals  the  affection  of  his 
canine  friend.  Henceforth,  the  pages  where 
Riquet  appears  are  the  best  in  the  book,  for  he 
alone  can  evoke  a  forgotten  indulgence  in  a 
master  embittered  by  his  intellectual  participa- 
tion in  the  "affair." 

"" 'For  Monsieur  Bergeret,  progressively  ideal- 
ized from  the  beginning  of  the  series,  we  may 
be  permitted  to  substitute  Anatole  France.  He, 
too,  had  already  supported  Dreyfus  indirectly; 


144 

his  free  discussion  of  the  army  and  of  military 
justice  had  revealed  his  real  sympathies.  Then, 
provoked  beyond  measure  by  later  develop- 
ments, he  found  irony  insufficient,  and  signed 
with  the  first  the  petition  for  revision  which 
appeared  on  the  morrow  of  Zola's  letter  J'ac- 
cuse.  This  was  the  Protestation  des  Intellec- 
tuels,  and  it  brought  to  its  signers  all  the  hate 
and  obloquy  of  the  mob.  Visitors  to  Paris  in 
1898  will  remember  the  mass-meetings,  the 
violence  of  the  military  press,  the  mad  battle 
waged  against  this  new  Leonidas  and  his  little 
group  of  heroes. 

Hence  the  note  of  pessimism  sounded  so  early 
in  L'Anneau  d'amethyste.  Discouraged  by  his 
first  encounter  with  real  life,  the  man  of  books 
decides  for  the  moment  that  action,  too,  is  vain. 
"Work  amuses  our  vanity,"  he  tells  us,  "work 
deceives  our  impotence  and  gives  us  the  hope 
of  some  good  result.  We  flatter  ourselves  that 
it  helps  us  control  destiny.  Not  understanding 
the  necessary  relations  which  bind  our  efforts 
to  the  mechanics  of  the  universe,  it  seems  to  us 
that  this  effort  is  directed  in  our  favor  against 
the  rest  of  the  machine.  Work  gives  us  the  illu- 
sion of  will,  of  strength  and  independence.  It 
makes  us  divine  in  our  own  eyes." 

This  reversion  to  determinism  is  of  course  to 


145 

be  expected.  Anatole  France  had  dreamed  of 
humanity  as  an  apostle  might  dream — a  Saint 
Francis  or  a  Tolstoy.  Now,  struggling  un- 
successfully with  the  blind  prejudice  of  the 
herd,  he  views  humanity  as  pessimistically  as 
Monsieur  Bergeret  in  his  library  beset  by  the 
mob.  'Tecus  is  fed  fat  with  ancient  lies.  He 
clings  to  error — error  that  he  has  tested.  He 
is  imitative  and  would  appear  more  so,  if  he 
did  not  deform  what  he  imitates.  These  defor- 
mations produce  what  we  call  progress." 

Thus  Professor  Bergeret,  while  stones  are 
crashing  through  his  library  window.  Unques- 
tionably, he  has  his  own  reasons  to  be  pessi- 
mistic. But  soon  comes  an  event  which  modi- 
fies his  fatalism,  renews  his  power  of  self- 
illusion.  Promoted  at  last  to  a  professorship, 
he  finds  "a  joy  greater  than  might  have  seemed 
consonant  with  his  progress  in  ataraxy,"  a  joy 
which  transforms  his  pessimism.  The  cynic 
who  had  called  life  a  leprosy,  a  disease,  who  had 
rejoiced  to  think  it  a  pure  terrestrial  accident, 
now  tells  his  favorite  pupil  of  his  belief  in  the 
inhabitants  of  the  stars.  "He  peoples  the  empty 
sky,  because  he  has  been  made  a  professor. 
Monsieur  Bergeret  is  a  philosopher,  but  he  is 
also  a  man."  One  might  add:  Why  try  to  be 
wiser  than  Monsieur  Bergeret? 


146 

So  through  plain  lives  and  high  thinking, 
L'Anneau  d'amethyste  progresses  to  its  end. 
Guitrel  gets  his  bishopric,  supported  as  he  is 
by  women  and  influential  Jews,  and  this  media- 
tor between  Church  and  State  promptly  turns 
against  the  latter  in  support  of  the  over-taxed 
congregations.  The  wealthy  anti-Semite  Jewess 
loses  her  soldier  lover,  implicated  in  the  for- 
geries of  the  "affair."  Professor  Bergeret  is 
called  to  Paris,  to  give  a  course  in  the  Sorbonne, 
and  prepares  to  quit  the  town  which  his  depar- 
ture transmutes  for  him  into  a  mere  empty 
image.  And  we  close  the  third  volume  of  His- 
toire  contemporaine  struck  by  the  sociologic 
character  of  its  dialogue  —  evidence  that  its 
author  is  now  seeking  a  living  pragmatic  truth. 

L'Anneau  d'amethyste  is  the  real  climax  in 
this  essay  in  realism.  Lacking  in  plot,  the  nar- 
rative scarcely  allows  a  new  Parisian  back- 
ground. So  despite  the  professor.  Monsieur 
Bergeret  a  Paris  (1901)  seems  rather  like  a 
sixth  act  in  a  play.  The  plotting  of  the  Royal- 
ists, the  Nationalist  movement,  are,  to  be  sure, 
sequels  of  the  "affair,"  and  the  author  finds 
means  to  draw  most  of  his  provincial  types  to 
Paris,  but  the  reader  wearies  of  politics,  of  its 
turncoat  social  climbers,  of  women  who  sell 
themselves  for  political  ends,  of  the  whole  cyn- 


147 

ical  farce  of  opportunism  hidden  in  filthy  back- 
stairs behind  the  posters  of  the  tricolor.  Pos- 
sibly this  is  why  Anatole  France  wearied  of  it 
too.  Why  should  he  continue  ?  He  had  shown 
how  a  novel  might  be  written  without  a  plot 
and  realize  every  perfection  except  climax.  He 
had  shown  that  satire  need  not  destroy  art,  the 
art  of  Le  jardin  d' Epicure;  for  even  its  finest 
pages  attain  no  higher  level  than  the  episode  of 
Riquet  or  Pied  d'Alouette. 

Fine  pages  of  course  are  not  lacking  in  Mon- 
sieur Bergeret  a  Paris,  especially  in  the  early 
chapters  written  in  the  tenderly  reminiscent 
manner  of  Le  Livre  de  mon  ami.  ^Transferred 
to  the  capital,  the  scholar  finds  at  last  a  suit- 
able apartment,  though  he  hates  apartments 
for  the  inartistic  uniformity  of  their  multi- 
cellular life.  Once  more  he  gathers  about  him 
his  wandering  Penates;  and  in  his  new  study, 
talking  with  the  carpenter  busy  at  some  new 
book-shelves,  he  first  reaps  a  word  of  praise  for 
his  martyrdom  from  this  proletarian  Drey- 
fusard. 

Of  course  poor  Riquet  must  bark  at  the  de- 
parting workman.  For  Riquet  bows  to  clothes 
as  men  to  uniforms,  and  like  men  he  detests 
the  new.  So  to  his  master's  tender  irony,  the 
dog  becomes  a  symbol  of  Pecus,  of  the  brute 


148 

herd  which  had  taken  the  side  of  force  and  in- 
justice and  falsehood.  Riquet,  too,  follows  the 
prejudices  of  his  race.  Riquet,  too,  is  turned 
away  from  pity  and  justice  by  fear,  by  the  fear 
which  was  father  to  the  gods  and  to  every 
crime.  Riquet,  too,  will  raise  his  voice  against 
the  new  divinity  Justice,  admiring  force  be- 
cause he  finds  it  sovereign.  And  Monsieur  Ber- 
geret  concludes :  "You  do  not  know  that  force 
devours  itself.  You  do  not  know  that  every 
weapon  must  fall  before  a  just  idea.  You  do 
not  know  that  our  real  force  is  in  wisdom,  that 
only  through  it  are  nations  great.  You  do  not 
know  that  what  makes  national  glory  is  not  the 
senseless  clamor  of  the  mob,  but  the  august 
thought  hidden  in  some  attic,  which  will  some 
day  overrun  the  world  and  change  its  very 
face.  You  do  not  know  that  they  honor  their 
fatherland  who  for  justice  have  suffered  prison, 
exile,  and  insult.    You  do  not  know." 

Action  has  made  Anatole  France  believe  in 
justice — he  who  first  believed  only  in  irony  and 
pity.  Now  he  will  even  question  pity,  for  if  he 
still  gives  to  the  beggar,  he  knows  that  "alms 
debase  equally  the  receiver  and  the  giver." 
Alms  only  keep  up  the  reign  of  injustice;  real 
charity  is  the  participation  of  all  in  productive 
labor  and  its  fruits.    "We  have  nothing  to  give 


149 

of  our  own,"  he  tells  us,  "nothing  but  ourselves 
So  we  only  truly  give  when  we  give  our  work, 
our  souls,  our  genius,  and  this  magnificent 
offering  of  one's  whole  self  enriches  the  giver 
as  much  as  the  community." 

Even  the  self-centered — if  true  Epicureans 
— must  find  out  the  joys  of  altruism.  None  the 
less,  this  altruism  does  not  make  Bergeret  an 
optimist.  He  knows  that  ''to  live  without  illu- 
sions is  the  secret  of  happiness."  But  having 
acted,  this  skeptic  must  believe  in  action,  must 
be  at  least  a  meliorist.  So  if  he  has  no  faith 
in  the  natural  goodness  of  man,  he  draws  some 
consolation  out  of  man's  emergence  from  orig- 
inal savagery — a  promise  from  the  past  for  an 
equally  distant  future.  He  looks  for  no  millen- 
nium; he  knows  that  evil  must  always  exist  as 
the  necessary  complement  of  good,  for  like  suf- 
fering and  pity,  it  is  a  part  of  the  nature  of 
things.  But  man  may  at  least  rid  society  of 
artificial  evil,  find  for  human  slavery  a  sub- 
stitute in  machinery,  in  the  unknown  energy  of 
the  electric  spark.  Then,  the  masters  of  the 
machine  will  be  content  with  the  honor  of  di- 
recting it,  and  wages  and  profits  will  all  be 
done  away. 

Of  course,  this  is  simply  the  theory  of  com- 
munism.   But,  "are  not  the  best  things  of  life 


150 

common  to  all?"  To  air  and  light,  our  primi- 
tive dowry  from  Nature,  have  we  not  already 
added  the  roads,  the  rivers,  the  royal  parks,  the 
libraries,  and  the  art  galleries  ?  Certainly,  com- 
munism will  improve  at  least  some  of  the  con- 
ditions of  life;  so,  believing  that  "men  are  less 
malevolent  when  they  are  less  miserable,"  the 
generous  scholar  will  give  his  hand  and  his 
faith  to  the  task  of  improvement.  "We  must 
work  at  the  future  like  the  weavers  of  high- 
warp  tapestry,  without  seeing  what  we  are 
weaving."  And  if  this  dream  of  his,  this  longed- 
for  City  of  Light,  prove  only  a  mirage,  he  feels 
that  the  vision  will  not  be  wholly  lost.  It  is 
good  for  men  to  build  their  Utopias.  For  "the 
dreams  of  philosophers  alone  excite  men  to 
action,"  and  "it  is  thought  which  really  creates 
the  future."  Surely,  a  living  word  will  some 
day  sweep  all  social  iniquity  away,  and  if  he 
may  not  see  it  go,  he  knows  that  it  must  dis- 
appear as  surely  as  did  the  giant  saurians  of 
our  geologic  past. 

So  we  are  not  surprised  to  find  Anatole 
France  ready  to  carry  his  new  truth  to  the 
people.  Drawn  at  last  into  the  streets,  the  man 
of  letters  will  soon  mount  the  tribune  of  reform. 
He  will  speak  to  socialists  and  radicals  and 
students,  add  his  word  wherever  men  dream 


151 

generous  dreams  for  France.  No  vain  optimist, 
but  chastened  by  life,  he  will  do  his  share  in  the 
secular  task  of  progress,  sure  that  "slowly,  but 
inevitably,  humanity  will  bring  to  realization 
its  sages'  dreams." 


CHAPTER  VIII 


THE  SOCIALIST  AND  THE  REFORMER:  CRAINQUE- 
BILLE  (1902-05) 


VIII 

THE  Histoire  contemporaine  had  not  occu- 
pied Anatole  France  exclusively  during 
the  troublous  years  from  1896  to  1901.  "One 
must  sometimes  seek  distraction  from  the  affairs 
of  to-day,"  Monsieur  Bergeret  had  said,  iron- 
ically explaining  the  fables  in  sixteenth-cen- 
tury French  which  adorn  the  last  two  volumes 
of  the  series.  But  insomuch  as  these  chapters 
still  satirize  the  present  in  their  allusions,  it  is 
clear  that  the  novelist  found  distraction  only 
in  his  other  books  of  this  period,  Pierre  Nosiere 
and  Clio. 

Both  volumes  preceded  Monsieur  Bergeret  a 
Paris.  Both  may  be  classified  as  digressions; 
and  if  Clio,  a  collection  of  historical  tales,  nat- 
urally falls  in  our  next  chapter,  the  reminis- 
cent Pierre  Nosiere  demands  an  excursus  in 
this  one.  From  now  on  we  must  be  prepared 
for  books  like  this,  second  harvests  of  mem- 
ories.    And  no  reader  of  Pierre  Nosiere  will 


156 

be  sorry  to  find  the  book  a  companion  volume 
to  Le  Livre  de  mon  ami,  or  regret  that  the  old 
Anatole  France  has  not  entirely  passed  away 
in  the  new. 

A  truce  to  satire!  The  tired  publicist  now 
returns  to  his  youth,  to  the  old  Bible  and  its 
quaint  woodcuts,  to  the  mother  who  told  such 
charming  stories  to  her  little  boy.  He  tells  us 
of  his  nurse  and  her  scapegrace  husband,  of  the 
old  curio  merchant,  of  the  bookseller  of  the 
quays.  He  will  draw  the  portrait  of  his  first 
editor,  sketch  again  the  two  artist  comrades  of 
Le  Chat  fnaigre.  Then,  in  mid-career,  his  vein 
suddenly  runs  out:  narration  gives  way  to 
fragmentary  impressions  or  memories,  "Notes 
written  by  Pierre  Noziere  on  the  margins  of  his 
big  Plutarch."  Now  he  inserts  a  pensee  which 
recalls  Le  jardin  d'Epicure,  now  a  dialogue 
probably  written  in  the  days  when  he  used  to 
imitate  Renan.  The  dialogue  proves  to  be  a 
skeptic's  criticism  of  intelligence,  but  the  reader 
will  agree,  with  one  of  the  speakers,  that  the 
whole  diatribe  is  only  a  lovers'  quarrel,  attack- 
ing a  beloved  mistress  because  "she  does  not 
yet  rule  the  world." 

The  last  half  of  the  volume  is  filled  with 
travel-impressions  evidently  drawn  from  some 
old  diary:  Promenades  de  Pierre  Noziere  en 


157 

France.  In  his  summer  vacations  he  has  vis- 
ited Pierrefonds,  Vernon,  Eu,  and  other  cor- 
ners of  Picardy  and  Brittany ;  and  the  result  is  a 
deHghtful  journal,  mingled  with  saintly  legend 
and  bits  of  medieval  story.  "For  cities  are 
like  books,  beautiful  picture-books  in  which  our 
forefathers  are  seen."  Standing  before  their 
time-worn  pages  of  stone,  the  earlier  Anatole 
France  is  born  again — the  poet  who  regrets 
the  sacred  groves  and  springs,  the  pagan  gods 
and  cults  surviving  only  as  local  superstitions, 
"As  long  as  there  are  woods,  meadows,  and 
mountains,  lakes  and  rivers,  as  long  as  the 
white  vapors  of  the  morning  still  rise  from  the 
streams,  there  will  be  nymphs  and  dryads,  there 
will  be  fairies.  They  are  the  beauty  of  this 
world :  that  is  why  they  will  never  pass  away."^ 
Delightful  too  are  the  chapters  on  the  coun- 
try fairs,  on  the  fisher-folk  of  Brittany.  Here, 
by  the  sombre  ocean  of  the  Bale  des  Trepasses, 
he  is  moved  to  write  a  long  reverie  on  the 
Odyssey,  perfect  as  the  finest  pages  of  La  Vie 
litteraire,  and  prophetic  of  Clio  in  its  tenderly 
vivid  realism.^  Thus  even  on  the  farthest  rocks 
of  Finisterre,  he  finds  the  beauty  that  he  brings 
to  them.  Surely  it  is  an  artist  and  a  real  patriot 
who  describes  so  lovingly  each  town  or  city  of 

1  Loc.  cit..  p.  219.  2  Ibid.,  p.  287. 


158 

his  wanderings,  reading  its  history  in  the  old 
stones  which  he  would  leave  unrestored  to  the 
touch  of  time.  For  each  little  city  speaks  to 
him,  tells  him  of  those  who  have  called  it 
mother,  of  those  who  are  gone.  "They  pass, 
but  I  remain  to  keep  their  memory  green.  I 
am  their  commemoration.  That  is  why  they 
owe  me  everything,  for  man  is  only  man  be- 
cause he  remembers ...  I  have  received  wounds 
which  men  thought  mortal.  But  I  live  because 
I  have  hoped.  Learn  from  me  that  sacred  hope 
which  saves  the  fatherland.  Think  in  me  so 
as  to  think  beyond  yourselves.  Work  for  your 
children  as  your  ancestors  have  worked  for  you. 
Your  sons  will  know  what  jewels  you  in  your 
turn  have  set  in  my  robe  of  stone."' — So  at  last 
we  find  a  page  to  link  with  the  present  this 
sheaf  gathered  from  the  portfolios  of  the  past. 
Born  of  a  vacation  mood,  it  is  an  interlude  in 
an  optimistic  key.  For  all  this  time  his  main 
interest  is  in  social  satire:  he  is  still  concerned 
with  politics  and  Monsieur  Bergeret,  and  when 
at  last  he  drops  Histoire  contemporaine,  it  is 
only  to  write  the  story  of  Crainqiiehille. 

Crainquebille  is  an  attack  on  the  iniquities 
of  the  law.  After  the  military  code  comes  the 
turn  of  civil  procedure,  whose  real  injustice 

» Ibid.,  p.  240. 


159 

had  long  been  evident  to  Anatole  France.  Need- 
less to  recall  the  Abbe  Coignard's  strictures 
against  the  laws,  or  the  satire  in  the  story  of 
Fra  Giovanni  and  the  opinions  of  Professor 
Bergeret.  But  it  is  always  interesting  to  seek 
the  genesis  of  a  book,  and  Crainquehille,  un- 
doubtedly, is  an  expansion  of  the  incident  of  the 
simple  Pied  d'Alouette. 

Arrested  on  suspicion,  the  vagabond  of  Le 
Mannequin  d' osier  leaves  his  prison  unscathed. 
In  Crainquehille  the  law  consummates  the  ruin 
of  its  victim.  Condemned  for  a  pretended  in- 
sult to  a  gendarme,  the  poor  huckster  pays  the 
penalty  of  his  ignorance,  since  his  unreadiness 
of  tongue  only  weakens  his  defense.  In  spite 
of  his  lawyer,  in  spite  of  the  witness  who  ex- 
onerates him,  he  goes  to  jail:  and  when  freed 
at  last  after  serving  his  time,  he  finds  himself 
without  customers,  the  byword  and  the  laugh- 
ing-stock of  the  quarter.  Poor  human  cart- 
horse, denied  his  bread  after  forty  years  of 
brutalizing  toil,  what  wonder  that  he  turns  to 
drink !  But  the  irony  of  Fate  has  not  yet  done 
with  Crainquehille.  Sunken,  at  last,  so  low 
that  he  regrets  his  prison  and  his  prison  fare, 
he  really  cries  "Down  with  the  cops,"  this  time 
to  a  grave  patient  gendarme  who  rebukes,  but 
refuses  to  arrest  him.    And  the  derelict  of  the 


160 

law  is  forced  to  resume  his  hopeless,  homeless 
way. 

The  cold,  biting  irony  of  this  story  recalls 
Maupassant.  Reprinted  in  Opinions  sociales, 
it  was  given  a  larger  audience  in  a  pamphlet 
published  at  half  a  franc,  and  finally  it  was 
turned  into  a  play.  The  cheap  edition  came 
out  in  the  Bibliotheque  socialist e  (1902),  pre- 
ceded by  the  even  more  brutally  satiric  Conte 
pour  commencer  I'annee.  In  this,  the  typical 
sugary  New  Year's  tale  is  turned  into  a  bitter 
farce — the  chimney-sweep  marrying  the  daugh- 
ter of  the  rich  man  by  necessity — a  satire  of 
social  pity  from  an  author  convinced  that  the 
poor  need  not  pity,  but  justice.  The  same  idea 
recurs  in  another  chapter  of  the  pamphlet,  Clo- 
pinel — the  story  of  Monsieur  Bergeret  and  the 
beggar,  drawn  from  Histoire  contemporaine. 
Then  comes  Bergeret's  conversation  with  the 
carpenter,  Roupart.  Opinions  sociales,  which 
runs  through  two  volumes  in  this  series,  re- 
prints in  fact  all  of  the  master's  views  on  ques- 
tions social  or  economic,  all  that  the  Abbe 
Coignard  or  the  professor  had  said  in  criticism 
of  things  as  they  are.  It  is  really  a  tract,  a  tract 
against  the  clerical  party  and  the  anti-Semites, 
against  the  army,  the  press,  and  the  injustice 
of  the  law. 


161 

Nor  is  this  all.  These  pamphlets  contain 
some  of  the  addresses  of  Anatole  France,  who 
had  begun  to  speak  in  public  during  the  "af- 
fair." He  defends  Picquart,  the  heroic  colonel 
who  first  stood  for  justice;  he  lifts  his  voice 
for  popular  education,  for  the  university-ex- 
tension movement  among  the  masses.  He  works 
for  progress,  for  enlightenment,  for  the  greater 
glory  of  a  future  France.  And  like  Sainte- 
Beuve  he  has  the  art  to  make  these  "allocu- 
tions," written  in  the  study  as  they  were,  simple 
and  forceful  and  direct  as  any  measured  speech. 

At  the  same  time  he  is  polishing  for  another 
audience  a  book  of  another  sort,  a  novel,  His- 
toire  coniique.  He  is  still  ambitious  to  write  a 
story  a  la  Bourget,  and  ten  years  after  Le  Lys 
rouge,  he  will  justify  again  the  sage's  quiet 
existence  by  a  picture  of  love  and  jealousy  and 
the  life  of  pleasure-seeking  Paris.  In  Histoire 
coniique  an  actor  commits  suicide  in  the  pres- 
ence of  his  former  mistress,  hoping  that  his 
dying  prohibition  may  keep  her  from  the  arms 
of  his  successor.  How  he  succeeds  in  this,  how 
his  memory  is  transformed  in  a  mind  too  ner- 
vously imaginative  and  not  quite  normal,  until 
it  becomes  an  accusing  ghost  which  forbids  her 
love,  is  the  story  of  this  novel,  a  hard,  cold, 
Degas-like  picture,  which  to  the  realism  of 


162 

Maupassant  adds  the  morbid  psychology  of 
Bourget  or  Zola. 

Anatole  France  thinks  the  story  "comic," 
that  is  to  say,  "concerned  with  comedians." 
He  might  have  explained  the  adjective  by  Scar- 
ron's  title,  Roman  comique.  But  there  is  noth- 
ing comic  in  this  glimpse  of  the  greenroom  and 
its  sordid  life,  disclosed  as  by  the  pitiless  glare 
of  the  footlights — a  world  of  compromise  and 
carnal  love  and  grosser  egoism  cloaked  by  the 
name  of  art.  When  the  story-teller  speaks  in 
his  own  person  of  "that  social  hypocrisy  which 
makes  it  possible  for  people  to  look  at  each 
other  without  horror  and  disgust,"  one  won- 
ders if  Anatole  France  has  taken  a  step  back- 
ward. Such  bitterness,  such  pessimism  either 
mark  a  moment  of  reaction,  or  prove  the  novel, 
like  Le  Lys  rouge,  a  work  of  several  years. 

Such  an  observation  shows  us  the  author  oflf 
his  guard.  For  the  rest,  his  irony  finds  vent 
through  the  lips  of  his  characters,  bitter  and 
nihilistic  in  the  dramatic  author  Constantin 
Marc,  indulgently  Epicurean  in  Doctor  Tru- 
blet.  This  genial  old  skeptic,  attached  officially 
to  the  theater  and  unofficially  to  the  pretty  come- 
diennes— this  Doctor  Socrates,  who  laments 
"the  deplorable  misunderstanding  which,  eight- 
een centuries  ago,  put  humanity  on  bad  terms 


163 

with  nature,"  is  another  Anatole  France,  smi- 
Hng  through  that  ^sculapian  mask  which  he 
had  worn  in  Jocaste. 

Perhaps  the  mask  is  adopted  to  justify  the 
pessimism.  At  any  rate  Doctor  Trublet's  opin- 
ions are  old  and  familiar.  Like  the  hero  of 
the  earlier  novel,  he  too  believes  that  "life  is 
murder."  For  him,  "stupidity  is  the  necessary 
condition  of  happiness" :  morality  "the  consent 
of  all  to  keep  what  they  have."  So  might  one 
string  a  chaplet  of  despair  from  the  maxims  of 
this  scientific  fatalist,  who,  certain  of  human 
irresponsibility,  certain  that  free  will  is  an  illu- 
sion, sees  the  only  hope  of  moral  improvement 
in  a  change  of  material  conditions  for  men. 
Thus,  he  thinks,  even  that  primal  law  of  mur- 
der may  pass,  fall  before  the  progress  of  chem- 
istry or  the  useful  arts.  In  so  much  at  least  he 
resembles  the  new  Anatole  France.  But,  if  this 
result  is  not  possible,  if  the  world  is,  as  it  seems, 
irremediably  bad,  the  old  viveur  consoles  him- 
self by  the  thought  that  he  has  at  least  enjoyed 
the  spectacle  it  has  given  him. 

Trublet  takes  us  back,  not  merely  to  Jocaste, 
but  to  its  author,  the  naturalist  and  disciple  of 
Taine.  Is  he  the  real  Anatole?  "On  revient 
toujours  a  ses  premieres  amours."  Anatole 
France  returns,  not  as  an  idealist  of  science, 


164 

but  as  a  skeptic  content  to  accept  truths  merely 
pragmatic.  "I  am  a  physician,"  Trublet  tells 
us  in  self-justification,  "I  keep  a  drug-shop  of 
lies.  I  give  relief,  consolation.  Can  one  con- 
sole and  relieve  without  lying  ?"  And  he  adds, 
"Women  and  doctors  know  how  necessary  and 
how  helpful  lies  are  to  men." 

Trublet  has  lost  faith  in  absolute  truth.  "Men 
are  not  created  to  know,  men  are  not  created  to 
understand."  If  we  know  more  than  the  dog, 
it  is  but  a  trifle,  and  "our  illusions  increase  with 
our  knowledge."  We  can  know  nothing,  attain 
no  certainty,  do  nothing;  and  like  Bergeret, 
Trublet  draws  a  bleak  comfort  from  the  thought 
that  the  future  already  exists  like  a  book  unread, 
a  reality  which  we  only  uncover  as  we  turn  the 
leaves.  "It  is  possible  to  think  that  we  all  died 
long  ago,"  observes  this  modern  Marcus  Aure- 
lius.    "Think  so,  and  you  will  be  at  peace." 

Such  pessimism  undoubtedly  reflects  the  au- 
thor's disappointment  in  the  "afifair."  The  fail- 
ure of  action  results  in  the  denial  of  action. 
But  it  recalls  also  his  youthful  view  of  the  world 
about  him,  reflects  its  gloom  and  magnifies  it. 
"To  know  society  as  it  really  is,"  says  a  journal- 
ist of  the  story,  "would  make  us  all  fall  swoon- 
ing with  disgust  and  horror."*    Certainly,  His- 

*Loc.  cit.,  p.  211. 


165 

toire  comique  was  conceived  in  the  middle  nine- 
ties, together  with  L'Orme  du  mail.  In  1903, 
Anatole  France  is  speaking  at  meetings,  work- 
ing for  reform,  not  merely  because  he  finds  in 
work  a  nepenthe  for  ennui,  but  because  his 
opened  eyes  perceive  so  much  to  do. 

There  was,  for  instance,  the  question  of 
Church  and  State.  The  Dreyfus  affair  aroused 
great  feeling  against  the  cassock,  when  French- 
men saw  that  the  clerics  had  used  anti-Semit- 
ism to  forward  their  own  reactionary  ends. 
Equally  prominent  among  monarchical  revolu- 
tionists and  in  the  Nationalist  movement,  they 
had  shown  themselves  a  dangerous  force  in  the 
Republic.  Hence  the  campaign  against  the 
teaching  congregations,  the  closing  of  the 
church  schools  and,  ultimately,  the  separation 
of  Church  and  State.  So,  not  content  with  his 
satire  of  episcopal  appointments  in  the  four 
novels,  Anatole  France  now  wrote  a  tract  for 
disestablishment,  UEglise  et  la  Republique. 

The  campaign  begun  by  the  caricature-por- 
trait of  the  Abbe  Jerome  is  now  complete.  With 
quiet,  well-bred  irony,  he  shows  the  unchanging 
claims  of  Rome  to  powers  both  spiritual  and 
temporal,  retraces  the  history  of  the  Church 
in  the  Third  Republic,  lays  bare  the  intrigues 
and  the  secret  motives  of  ecclesiastical  policy, 


166 

builds  up  his  case  against  the  Concordat.  And 
the  conclusion  of  the  pamphlet  is  a  ringing 
appeal  to  Frenchmen  to  stop  this  control  of 
France  from  without,  to  destroy  this  political 
force  by  abolishing  the  division  of  power  agreed 
upon  by  a  despot  a  century  before. 

Nor  was  his  role  as  a  propagandist  to  end 
here.  In  Vers  les  temps  meilleurs,  made  up  of 
all  his  speeches  delivered  from  1898  to  1906. 
the  publisher  of  L'Eglise  et  la  Republique  car- 
ried out  definitely  the  task  of  bringing  together 
all  his  propaganda — a  task  only  begun  by  the 
fragmentary  pamphlets  of  the  Bibliotheque  so- 
cialiste.  Half  a  hundred  speeches,  addresses, 
and  letters  were  collected,  a  panoply  of  good 
counsel  for  the  proletariat  in  its  struggle  for 
better  conditions.  Not  to  listen  to  the  preach- 
ers of  suffering,  for  "it  is  joy  which  is  good," 
but  to  trust  in  reason  and  science  which  free 
men  from  the  vain  terrors  of  theology;  not  to 
support  the  Nationalists  or  the  contractors  who 
urge  increased  armies  and  armament,  nor  the 
politicians  who  seek  to  involve  France  in  im- 
perialism, but  to  work  for  the  peace  universal 
which  the  proletariat  of  all  nations  is  prepar- 
ing— such  is  the  perpetual  refrain  of  these 
pages:  optimistic  pages,  in  fine,  for  if  society 
is  now  only  "organized  barbarism  and  regular- 


167 

ized  injustice,  still  it  is  thought  which,  despite 
the  victories  of  force,  conducts  the  world." 
Two  fine  tributes,  one  to  the  heroic  spirit  of 
Emile  Zola — "il  fut  un  moment  de  la  conscience 
humaine" — another  to  Ernest  Renan,  are  in- 
cluded; in  the  latter,  the  magnificent  discourse 
of  Pallas  Athene  has  often  been  compared  to 
La  priere  siir  VAcropole.  But  always  he  is 
preaching  the  cause  of  humanity  and  human 
solidarity,  branding  the  Armenian  massacres, 
scoring  the  murderous  treatment  of  the  revo- 
lutionists in  St.  Petersburg.  And  just  after 
the  Czar's  visit,  while  Parisian  crowds  are 
still  shouting  "Vive  la  Russie,"  he  has  the  cour- 
age to  unmask  and  denounce  the  capitalistic 
interests  which  have  contrived  this  political 
comedy  in  order  to  pay  for  the  Japanese  war 
out  of  the  French  stocking.  Loan  and  alliance 
are  another  victory  of  capitalism  over  the  mas- 
ses, a  victory  cloaked  by  a  secret  diplomacy 
which  no  republic  should  allow.  In  his  vision, 
France  should  be  the  leader  in  a  sane  prepara- 
tion for  a  pacifistic  Europe;  for  "universal 
peace  will  be  realized,  not  because  man  will 
become  better,  but  because  a  new  order  of 
things,  a  new  science,  new  economic  necessities 
will  impose  peace." 

All  this  in  spite  of  Germany,  with  her  "per- 


168 

feet  corporal,  the  corporal  Hohenzollern,  the 
corporal  Lohengrin,  who,  corporal  in  soul  as 
in  mustachios,  was  destined  by  profession  and 
by  nature  to  make  war."  For  if,  in  1905,  this 
superman  had  proved  himself  eminent  in  every- 
thing except  that,  who  were  responsible  ?  The 
German  Socialists,  concludes  Anatole  France; 
— falling  into  the  naive  error  that  national  wars 
can  be  averted  by  the  "Internationale." 

Naive,  but  generous  surely.  A  writer  of  fic- 
tion may  be  proud  of  such  a  dream.  And  not- 
withstanding all  this  polemic  activity,  Anatole 
France  was  still  a  writer  of  fiction.  The  story 
of  Crainquebille  was  rounded  out  to  a  volume 
with  other  sketches,  realistic  and  contemporary 
and  for  the  most  part  satiric  of  militarism  and 
justice  founded  on  property  —  still  reflecting 
the  author's  reaction  to  the  "aflfair."  Two 
stories  of  the  occult  and  a  mystic  legend  are 
exceptions,  as  well  as  the  inimitable  account  of 
the  imaginary  Putois,  a  fable  on  the  growth 
of  a  belief.  The  volume  seems  to  be  made  up 
of  odds  and  ends;  it  contains  several  detached 
chapters  evidently  left  over  from  Monsieur 
Bergeret  a  Paris;  and  next  to  Putois,  its  best 
pages  are  the  delightful  Pensees  de  Riquet,  a 
parody  of  La  Bruyere,  satirizing  from  a  canine 


169 

point  of  view  our  anthropomorphic  philosophy 
and  religion. 

Much  of  this  work  probably  dates  from  a  few 
years  before.  The  book  which  best  reflects  his 
present  interest,  and  which  crowns  the  polemic 
period  now  drawing  to  a  close,  is  Sur  la  pierre 
blanche  (1905).  A  pure  dialogue,  or  rather 
a  symposium,  it  contains  two  works  of  fiction, 
a  story  of  the  past  and  a  dream  of  the  future. 
Several  Frenchmen  meet  in  the  Roman  Forum, 
and  a  conversation  on  Roman  archeology,  re- 
ligion, and  prehistory  introduces  us  to  the  first 
narrative,  another  resurrection  of  the  life  of  a 
Roman  province  under  the  emperors.  Read 
to  the  company  by  its  author,  the  story  of 
Gallio,  proconsul  of  Achaia  under  Claudius,  is 
a  bit  of  tapestry  embroidered  on  the  incidents 
described  in  Acts  xviii.  12-17. 

As  seen  by  Anatole  France,  Gallio  is  a  model 
of  Roman  virtue,  just  and  temperate  as  Pontius 
Pilatus  in  the  earlier  tale.  Besides  this,  he  is 
a  man  of  culture,  stirred  by  a  noble  curiosity 
in  all  the  things  of  the  intellect.  With  a  group 
of  friends  he  is  discussing  the  future,  the  cer- 
tain future  of  Rome  assured  by  the  pax  Ro- 
mana,  the  doubtful  future  of  the  old  religion 
already  become  a  symbol  in  a  larger  recognition 
of  natural  law.     Gallio,  who  would  reconcile 


170 

the  Stoic  doctrine  with  the  old  beliefs,  rises  to 
the  conception  of  a  single  God,  obedient  only 
to  his  own  nature,  the  God  of  the  Stoics.  Yet 
in  his  wisdom  he  would  show  his  companions 
the  value  of  diversity  of  religion,  since  such 
diversity  alone  guarantees  tolerance  and  per- 
sonal freedom.  And  they  speak  of  the  immor- 
tality of  the  soul,  the  immortality  of  the  gods, 
and  wonder  what  god  will  succeed  Jupiter  when 
he  follows  Saturn  into  oblivion.  At  this  point 
the  Proconsul  is  interrupted  by  a  band  of  quar- 
reling Jews,  claiming  an  audience.  Despite  the 
protests  of  his  friends,  Gallio  yields  to  duty, 
knowing  that  this  turbulent  race,  full  of  new 
Dionysiac  sects  whose  propaganda  admitted 
no  tolerance,  must  be  watched  as  a  menace  to 
peace  in  Corinth  no  less  than  at  Rome.  And  all 
deplore  the  infiltration  of  this  Asiatic  poison 
through  the  Empire. 

Meanwhile  Gallio  listens  to  the  plaintiflf, 
who,  chief  of  the  synagogue,  accuses  a  certain 
Paul  of  inducing  men  to  worship  God  in  a 
manner  contrary  to  Jewish  law.  But  Saint 
Paul's  defense  he  will  not  hear,  declaring:  "If 
it  were  a  matter  of  wrong  or  of  wicked  lewd- 
ness, I  would  bear  with  you,  but  if  it  be  a  ques- 
tion of  words  and  names  of  your  law,  I  shall 
be  no  judge  of  such  matters."    And  he  rejoins 


171 

his  friends,  all  unconscious  of  having  dismissed 
the  co-founder  of  a  world-religion  destined  to 
supplant  the  Stoic  philosophy  and  the  pagan 
gods. 

Gallio  sought  the  future.  The  future  comes 
to  him  and  he  knows  it  not.  Indifferent  to  the 
deformed  little  Jew  whom  he  takes  for  a  fanat- 
ical follower  of  Orpheus  or  Adonis,  the  Pro- 
consul turns  the  conversation  back  into  its 
former  channel,  and  leaving  the  Apostle  to  be 
stoned  by  the  Jews,  he  sets  forth  his  view  that 
Hercules  is  destined  to  dethrone  Jove  and  rule 
the  world. 

Gallio  is  thus  suspiciously  like  an  attempt  to 
repeat  the  success  of  Le  Procurateur.  TUe 
story  finished,  sources  are  cited  and  discussed. 
Tacitus  and  Seneca  have  added  coloring  to  the 
silhouette  of  the  Bible-story,  developed  from 
a  hint  found  in  a  passage  of  Renan.  For  the 
historian  of  Christianity  had  also  remarked  the 
irony  of  the  situation,  although  his  inference 
from  it  was  far  less  flattering  to  Gallio. 

Sur  la  pierre  blanche  now  reverts  to  a  dis- 
cussion on  the  growth  of  religions,  and  the 
evolution  of  morals  which  prepared  the  way 
alike  for  Stoicism  and  for  Christianity.  The 
cyclic  theory  of  cosmic  life,  the  more  immediate 
future  as  seen  in  man's  various  Utopias,  are 


172 

touched  upon;  then  the  talk  returns  to  the 
possibiHty  of  prediction.  Surely  the  history  of 
man  should  yield  certain  analogies,  certain  par- 
allels or  probabilities.  The  progress  of  labor 
from  slavery  and  serfdom  to  an  equality  with 
capital  may  indicate  the  future  triumph  of  the 
proletariat,  as  the  decline  of  paganism  suggests 
a  like  fate  for  Christianity.  The  virtual  pax 
Romana  of  a  world  unified  by  conquest  and 
commerce  may  presage  a  new  world-truce,  after 
colonization  has  brutally  imposed  a  new  soli- 
darity. Peace  may  come,  concludes  Anatole 
France;  for,  if  Germany  and  America  still  ap- 
pear belligerent,  his  fatherland  has  certainly 
lost  under  the  Republic  her  old  love  of  things 
military. 

At  the  little  table  of  the  Roman  restaurant 
where  the  company  dines,  another  manuscript 
is  read — a  dream  of  the  future  conceived  after 
the  manner  of  William  Morris  and  H.  G.  Wells. 
A  young  Parisian,  bored  and  disillusioned  and 
skeptical,  awakes  one  morning  in  the  year  220 
of  the  Federation  of  the  Peoples — 2270  accor- 
ding to  our  chronology.  He  finds  himself  in  a 
country  transformed,  a  sort  of  endless  suburb 
filled  with  tiny  houses  and  their  gardens.  Over- 
head huge  birds  and  fishes  are  gliding  through 
the  air,  or  pausing  to  fill  the  empty  streets  with 


173 

workers  of  both  sexes,  indistinguishable  in 
garb.  Entering  a  restaurant,  he  learns  that 
one  must  work  to  eat,  and  one  of  the  Utopians 
imagining  him  an  estray  from  the  Republic  of 
Africa,  leads  him  to  a  bakery  where  he  receives 
his  ticket,  wages  of  six  hours'  toil.  This  friend 
takes  him  home  in  his  aeroplane,  and  after  sup- 
per, the  stranger  learns  how  the  new  order  of 
things  had  come  about.  War  had  ceased  with 
the  twentieth  century,  secret  diplomacy  giving 
way  to  an  international  committee  of  citizens 
opposed  to  colonial  greed,  which  had  caused  the 
last  conflicts  among  nations.  Meanwhile,  a 
capitalistic  regime  had  naturally  evolved  into 
collectivism;  armies  were  supplanted  by  a  so- 
cialistic militia  and  the  undefended  monarchies 
had  become  republics  and  made  alliance.  Then, 
after  fifty  years  of  experiment  and  economic 
misery,  fourteen  workmen  had  organized  and 
distributed  the  conflicting  powers  and  resources 
of  this  new  society,  a  beehive  without  drones, 
where  every  worker  profited  alike  by  intensive 
agriculture  and  an  intensive  development  of 
machinery  and  applied  chemistry.  With  ample 
time  to  pursue  the  arts  ( for  here,  as  with  Oscar 
Wilde,  the  individualism  of  Anatole  France  re- 
veals its  desire),  contented  to  labor  and  be 
fed,  the  inhabitants  of  this  new  Utopia  still 


174 

confess  they  are  not  happy.  But  que  voulez- 
vous?  No  one  at  least  is  miserable,  and  by 
abolishing  property  and  cities  they  have  been 
able  to  do  away  with  crime  and  litigation. 

The  dream  concludes  with  an  episode  show- 
ing the  relation  of  the  sexes,  freed  from  the 
personal  servitude  of  marriage  and  apparently 
from  the  Petrarchistic  illusions  of  courtship! 
And  the  reader,  laying  down  his  manuscript, 
receives  the  placid  comment  of  a  classical  quo- 
tation :  "You  seem  to  have  slept  upon  the  white 
stone,  in  the  midst  of  the  people  of  dreams." 
Dreams !  So,  possibly,  the  whole  Utopia  is  not 
to  be  taken  very  seriously  in  the  author.  For 
if  like  Renan  he  accepts  the  possibility  of  Cali- 
ban, if  we  may  attribute  to  him  the  statement 
of  one  listener,  *'I  do  not  wish  for  socialism, 
but  I  do  not  fear  it," — he  does  put  his  dream 
of  the  new  Atlantis  under  the  decidedly  am- 
biguous rubric,  'Through  the  Gate  of  Ivory,  or 
through  the  Gate  of  Horn!" 


CHAPTER  IX 


THE  HISTORIAN  AND  THE  SATIRIST  OF  HUMAN- 
ITY:  THE  PENGUINS    (1906-1914). 


IX 


ANATOLE  FRANCE  was  now  sixty-two. 
L  In  Vers  les  temps  meilleurs  (1906)  he 
had  rounded  out  no  less  than  thirty  volumes. 
For  the  last  ten  years  he  had  lived  with  his 
times,  and  in  the  arena  as  in  his  study  had  still 
averaged  a  book  a  year.  But  from  that  first 
descent  into  the  world  of  the  present,  from  the 
appearance  of  L'Orme  du  mail  ( 1897),  he  had 
produced  no  sustained  masterpiece  like  La  Rd- 
tisserie ;  only  one  volume  of  this  polemic  decade 
revealed  the  patient  student  and  lover  of  the 
past. 

This  volume  was  Clio  ( 1900).  The  muse  of 
history  ofifers  five  pictures  from  the  story  of 
man's  existence,  five  typical  panels,  no  longer 
mystic  or  philosophical  like  the  earlier  tales, 
but  products  of  the  same  reaction  and  of  the 
same  vision  which  sharpened  the  realism  of 
Histoire  contemporaine.  "We  want  to  show 
Hector  in  greaves,"  said  the  author  in  Pierre 


178 

Noziere,  "and  give  to  all  the  figures  of  legend 
and  history  their  real  characteristics."  Thus 
a  minute  archeological  exactness,  such  as  Flau- 
bert had  attempted  in  Salammho,  is  the  key- 
note of  Clio,  dedicated,  by  the  way,  to  the  cham- 
pion of  naturalism  and  Dreyfus,  Emile  Zola. 

Not  Hector,  but  the  singer  of  Hector,  opens 
the  panorama.  A  world  poetic  in  its  very  real- 
ism, baldly  poetic  as  the  humbler  scenes  of  the 
Odyssey,  is  revived  for  us  in  Le  chanteur  de 
Kyme;  the  poor  old  minstrel,  rude  yet  pro- 
foundly human,  has  something  of  the  heroic 
candor  of  Rodin's  Penseur.  Living  meagerly 
with  his  faithful  slave,  patient  and  laborious, 
the  ancient  bard  teaches  the  children  of  Kyme 
the  Fair  the  songs  he  had  received  from  his 
father,  and  his  father  from  the  muses  them- 
selves. These  sacred  songs  must  not  be  changed, 
he  tells  them,  hiding  the  fact  that  he  has  added 
whole  cantos  to  the  muses'  inheritance,  sung 
so  often  at  the  tables  of  the  shepherd-kings. 
Everything  in  the  picture  is  presented  objec- 
tively: his  ignorance — for  he  knows  by  his 
dreams  that  the  dead  still  live  in  some  dim 
shadowy  world ;  his  resignation,  which  accepts 
without  bitterness  the  hard  contrast  between 
the  lot  of  the  bard  and  the  warrior ;  his  love  of 
beauty,  his  idealism  and  disgust  at  life's  brutal- 


179 

ities.  When  the  banquet  of  one  of  these  rough 
chieftains  ends  in  a  battle,  and  the  aged  poet  is 
hurt  by  a  flying  torch,  he  picks  up  his  lyre,  curses 
the  house  and  its  occupants,  and  walks  calmly 
seaward  on  the  moonlit  cliff,  until  the  earth 
which  had  borne  him  so  long  fails  beneath  his 
faltering  steps. — For  this  objectivity,  Homer 
himself  furnished  outlines  and  colors — even  fig- 
ures, like  that  little  sister  to  Nausicaa,  whose 
slender  beauty,  glimpsed  by  the  wayside,  de- 
lights the  weary  minstrel  no  less  than  the 
draught  she  gives  him  from  her  own  cupped 
palms. 

The  clear  sunlight  of  Homer,  uncannily  vivid 
in  a  picture  where  no  brush-stroke  betrays  the 
modern,  now  changes  to  the  mistier  skies  that 
dome  the  forests  of  Caesar's  Gaul.  The  Com- 
mentaries lend  color  and  sparkling  directness 
to  the  tale  of  Komm  VAtrehate,  huntsman  and 
warrior  and  collector  of  his  enemies'  heads. 
After  the  defeat  of  his  savage  fellow-tribesmen 
by  the  Romans,  Komm  becomes  an  ally  of  these 
demigods  of  the  catapult  and  the  magic  roads 
of  stone,  goes  to  Britain  in  Caesar's  service,  and 
witnesses  his  triumph  and  discomfiture  there. 
Then,  won  over  to  rebellion  by  resentful  Gauls, 
Komm  plots  against  the  Romans;  and,  escap- 
ing the  dagger-thrust  by  which  Titus  Labienus 


180 

had  hoped  to  dispatch  him,  swears  vengeance 
and  joins  Vercingetorix. 

The  rebellion  fails.  A  fugitive  now,  living 
by  the  chase,  Komm  stumbles  one  day  upon  the 
stone  city  which  had  taken  the  place  of  his  old 
camp.  Disguised  as  a  pedlar,  he  enters  the 
town,  marveling  at  its  corruption  and  its  lux- 
ury, for  not  understanding,  he  hates  the  arts 
of  Rome.  At  last  he  comes  to  the  new  amphi- 
theater, and  there  slays  by  stealth  a  young 
Roman  writing  poetry  to  his  mistress  in  the 
twilight  of  early  dawn. 

Marcus  Antonius  comes  to  Gaul  as  quaestor. 
Gradually  the  Gauls  become  Romanized,  shav- 
ing, dressing,  and  building  as  the  Romans  do. 
An  exile  in  the  forest,  Komm  has  fallen  to 
guerilla  warfare,  then  to  mere  indiscriminate 
brigandage.  Hostages  are  legally  murdered 
for  his  misdeeds ;  an  unsuccessful  expedition  is 
organized  against  him.  Komm  keeps  in  hid- 
ing until  he  has  satisfied  his  private  vengeance 
against  the  tool  of  Labienus;  then,  finding  his 
enmity  gone  with  his  revenge,  he  sues  for  peace 
and  obtains  it  from  the  quaestor. 

Thus,  by  a  masterly  choice  of  incident,  the 
story  becomes  typical  of  an  epoch.  A  world 
policy  is  crystallized  in  this  purely  objective 
relation.     Rome  conquers  in  the  end,  by  op- 


181 

posing  the  calm  tenacity  and  order  of  her  dur- 
able organization  to  the  weakness  of  barbarian 
individualism,  incapable  of  long-continued  re- 
sistance, destined  to  perish  as  surely  as  the  war 
it  had  waged  dwindled  and  died  in  mere  high- 
way robbery. 

War  again  —  the  civil  war  of  Italy  in  the 
thirteenth  century  —  furnishes  the  subject  of 
Earinata  degli  Uberti,  with  its  clever  charac- 
terization of  the  mingled  cruelty,  egoism,  and 
patriotism  of  the  old  Florentine  who,  at  Arbia, 
betrayed  his  fellow  citizens  in  the  interests  of 
his  party  and  his  private  vengeance.  Farinata 
justifies  himself  by  his  resistance,  afterward, 
to  the  Ghibellines,  victorious  and  eager  to  de- 
stroy that  nest  of  Guelphs.  And  this  contrasted 
tableau  of  patriotism  in  an  age  of  feuds  ends 
in  the  hero's  declaring  himself  an  atheist  and 
a  disciple  of  Epicurus,  skeptical  alike  of  heaven 
and  of  that  hell  into  which  Dante's  lines  have 
thrust  him. 

Farinata  degli  Uberti  is  hardly  a  story,  nor 
are  the  other  scenes  in  this  historical  pageant. 
Le  roi  boit  gives  one  a  contrasted  picture  of 
France  in  the  Hundred  Years'  War;  for  the 
merry  feast  in  the  rich  monastery  is  interrupted 
by  a  murder  swift  and  ferocious  as  the  deeds 
of    the  soldier-factions  which    are  desolating 


182 

France  outside  the  convent  walls.  And  finally, 
in  La  Muiron,  we  meet  the  Man  of  Destiny  re- 
turning from  Egypt,  calm  and  confident  in  his 
long  flight  through  the  English  squadron,  trust- 
ing in  the  star  which  points  to  the  land  of  his 
glory  and  his  fall.  Fascinated  by  the  problems 
of  a  temperament  so  different  from  his  own, 
Anatole  France  had  already  discussed  Napo- 
leon in  Le  Lys  rouge;  now  he  presents  objec- 
tively his  earlier  analysis.  Napoleon,  to  him, 
is  the  perfect  type  of  the  man  of  action,  who 
lives  wholly  in  the  present,  the  automaton  of 
determinism  who  believes  in  Fate  rather  than 
in  human  will.  "Etre  grand,  c'est  dependre  de 
tout."  And  as  Anatole  France  feels  the  phi- 
losopher is  a  far  superior  type,  he  naturally 
adorns  his  hero's  fatalism  with  some  touches  of 
superstition. 

Thus  ends  Clio,  vivid  as  Flaubert's  tales, 
colorful  as  the  illustrations  drawn  for  the  book 
by  Alphonse  Mucha.  One  regrets  that  the 
vogue  of  the  artist  has  long  since  exhausted  the 
edition,  so  that  it  is  now  almost  unobtainable 
outside  the  greater  libraries. 

"History  is  an  art,  and  one  succeeds  in  it 
only  by  the  imagination."  Ten  years  before 
Clio,  Anatole  France  had  come  to  this  conclu- 


183 

sion,  set  down  in  the  second  edition  of  Sylvestre 
Bonnard,  in  the  essays,  and  in  Le  jardin  d' Epi- 
cure. But  this  denial  of  historical  science  came 
from  a  student  of  history,  from  one  who  had 
early  learned  her  boasted  methods;  and  all 
through  these  years  given  up  in  part  to  histor- 
ical fiction,  he  had  been  working  on  his  Vie  de 
Jeanne  d'Arc.  Back  in  the  eighties  he  had 
conceived  the  basic  idea  of  his  treatment,  con- 
signed at  once  to  the  pages  of  La  Vie  litteraire  f 
and  if  Professor  Bergeret  so  often  reverts  to 
the  Maid,  it  is  because  his  alter  ego  is  deep  in 
research :  so  deep,  in  fact,  that  he  found  it  most 
natural  to  adopt  that  professorial  mask. 

In  1908,  Anatole  France  published  two  bulky 
volumes,  the  fruit  of  these  two  decades.  "I  have 
restored  the  Maid  to  life  and  to  humanity,"  he 
declares  in  his  Preface.^  And  every  reader  of 
her  story,  so  simply  and  beautifully  told,  will 
carry  away  a  portrait  of  Joan  both  living  and 
human,  and  far  more  real  than  any  ecclesias- 
tical or  transcendental  interpretation.  He  will 
carry  away,  too,  a  vivid  picture  of  the  age, 
with  all  its  lawlessness  and  cruelty,  its  ignor- 
ance and  superstition;  he  will  realize  the  long 
martyrdom,  the  grievous  travail  by  which  the 
French  nation  was  born.    For  never  does  the 

1 II,  269.  2  English  edition. 


184 

author  let  slip  a  chance  to  clear  up  a  point  by 
a  parallel,  to  quote  a  legend,  or  tell  an  illumi- 
nating anecdote.  The  hasty  reader  may  balk 
at  this,  but  the  student  who  would  learn  will 
only  praise. 

Thus  conceived,  not  as  a  saint,  or  a  seeress, 
but  as  a  mystic  and  an  heroic  girl,  limned  in 
the  style  of  the  old  chronicles,  a  style  at  once 
simple  and  rich  with  expressive  archaism,  the 
figure  of  Joan  has  all  the  directness  and  pathos, 
all  the  human  unity  of  a  heroine  in  a  great  his- 
torical novel.  Only  occasional  touches  of  irony, 
called  forth  in  the  main  by  ecclesiastical  stu- 
pidity or  guile,  reveal  the  author.  No  patho- 
logical discussions  mar  the  narrative;  here  at 
least,  as  he  says  in  the  Preface,  he  accepts 
Joan  as  "a  saint,  a  saint  with  all  the  attributes 
of  fifteenth-century  sanctity,"  but  he  does  show 
the  natural  cause  of  her  visions,  trace  her  re- 
semblance to  similar  visionaries,  like  Saint 
Catherine  of  Siena  and  Saint  Colette  of  Corbie. 
By  these  and  by  other  parallels  he  explains  her, 
with  her  heroic  hallucinations,  finding  beneath 
the  directness  of  her  actions  the  automatism 
of  all  the  mystics.  And  thus  he  makes  her  hu- 
man and  understandable,  after  the  manner  of 
Renan  in  his  Vie  de  Jesus. 

Matters  of  science  like  these,  however,  are 


185 

kept  in  the  Introduction,  together  with  a  long 
examination  of  the  sources.  It  is  here,  too, 
that  he  tells  us  by  what  pains  that  unity  of  tone 
was  obtained;  how  "the  difficulty  of  entering 
into  the  spirit  of  a  period  lies  not  so  much  in 
what  one  must  know  as  in  what  one  must  not 
know."  How  hard  for  a  biographer  of  Joan 
to  forget  that  the  earth  is  round,  that  the  stars 
are  not  lamps  but  suns,  to  substitute  for  the 
cosmogony  of  Laplace  the  science  of  Dante  and 
Saint  Thomas!  —  He  speaks  of  the  travels 
which  give  color  to  his  landscapes,  from  the 
first  picture  of  the  misty  river-valley  of  Joan's 
birthplace,  so  favorable  to  dreaming,  to  the 
gaunt  half-timbered  houses  which  beheld  the 
final  scene  of  the  tragedy  at  Rouen.  He  tells 
us  how  lovingly  he  had  studied  everything  left 
by  the  fifteenth  century,  works  of  stone  or  iron 
or  wood,  figures  carved  and  painted  by  men 
who  lived  nearly  five  hundred  years  ago.  And 
he  adds,  "As  I  gazed  at  the  old  miniatures,  they 
seemed  to  live  before  me,  and  I  saw  the  noble- 
men in  the  absurd  magnificence  of  their  sham 
velvet,  the  dames  and  demoiselles  somewhat 
diabolic  with  their  horned  caps  and  their  pointed 
shoes;  clerks  seated  at  the  desk,  men-at-arms 
riding  their  chargers  and  merchants  their  mules, 
husbandmen  performing  from  April  till  March 


186 

all  the  tasks  of  the  rural  calendar;  peasant 
women  whose  broad  coifs  are  still  worn  by 
nuns ;  and  I  drew  near  to  these  folk,  who  were 
our  fellows,  and  who  yet  differed  from  us  by 
a  thousand  shades  of  thought  and  feeling;  I 
lived  their  lives;  I  read  their  hearts." 

This  is  perhaps  why  Anatole  France  has 
achieved  so  real  a  portrait  in  his  Life  of  Joan 
of  Arc.  "To  succeed  in  history  one  must  have 
imagination," — an  imagination  directed  by 
love.  And  if,  beguiled  by  his  vision,  he  possibly 
drew  with  too  free  a  pen,  if  his  references  were 
corrected  by  Andrew  Lang  and  others,  no  pro- 
fessional scholar  could  be  quicker  than  he  was 
to  acknowledge  his  mistakes  and  to  correct 
them.  *T  have  written  this  history  with  ardent, 
tranquil  zeal,"  he  declares,  "1  have  sought 
Truth  strenuously,  I  have  met  her  fearlessly. 
Even  when  she  assumed  an  unexpected  aspect 
I  have  not  turned  from  her."'  With  this 
affirmation  we  must  leave  to  time  and  the 
historians  the  evaluation  of  his  magnum  opus, 
which  he  defends  with  quiet  dignity  in  his  In- 
troduction. 

As  we  have  seen.  La  Vie  de  Jeanne  d'Arc 
was  more  than  twenty  years  in  the  making. 
With  it,  Anatole  France  had  begun  an  histor- 

8  Introduction,  English  edition. 


187 

ical  novel,  not  to  be  completed  until  four  years 
later,  after  a  period  of  relaxation  marked  by 
three  volumes  of  satire.  Last  of  his  serious 
novels,  Les  Dieiix  ont  soif  (1912)  harks  back 
to  those  Revolutionary  times  of  which  he  had 
given  us  so  many  anecdotes  in  earlier  works. 
It  is  a  picture  of  the  every-day  life  of  1793, 
a  novel  in  which  people  eat  and  drink  and  sleep, 
indifferent,  as  many  of  us  in  1914,  to  the  tre- 
mendous drama  of  contemporary  history. 
Weary  of  the  dream  of  fraternity  which  they 
have  not  found,  their  interest  turns  solely  to 
pleasure  parties,  to  songs  and  plays  and  ro- 
mances: the  scarcity  of  food  is  more  to  them 
than  the  Republic;  each  great  event  dwindles 
as  it  enters  their  dwarfish  minds  and  becomes 
as  insignificant  as  they.  In  the  background 
rages  the  Revolution :  we  hear  vaguely  of  mili- 
tary disasters,  of  foreign  plots;  we  get  a  pass- 
ing glimpse  of  Marat  and  of  Robespierre,  of 
the  goddess  Guillotine,  of  the  "woman  An- 
toinette" on  her  way  to  the  block.  But  never 
absent  from  the  picture  is  the  Revolutionary 
Tribunal,  constantly  growing  in  power,  until 
at  the  end  it  becomes  a  bete  mystique,  like  the 
mine  in  Germinal.  "The  prisons  were  full,  the 
public  accuser  worked  eighteen  hours  a  day. 
To  the  defeats  of  the  armies,  to  the  revolts  of 


188 

the  provinces,  to  the  conspiracies,  the  plots, 
and  the  betrayals,  the  Convention  opposed  the 
Reign  of  Terror.    The  gods  were  athirst." 

The  hero  of  the  story  is  the  young  painter 
Gamelin,  austere  and  rigid  as  the  works  of  his 
master  David.  Made  a  member  of  the  Revo- 
lutionary Tribunal  through  the  offices  of  a 
scheming  adventuress,  he  is  transformed  by 
his  conception  of  duty  and  patriotism  into  a 
judicial  machine,  inhuman  and  unfeeling  as  the 
knife  itself.  In  the  end  he  becomes  a  monster, 
sacrificing  friend  and  foe  alike,  inflexible  even 
to  the  claims  of  a  mother  and  sister.  Against 
this  type,  so  antipodal  to  the  humanitarian 
hedonism  of  the  author  (remember  his  stric- 
tures on  the  ^'inhumanity  of  Pascal")  is  set  the 
figure  of  the  ruined  tax-farmer  Brotteaux,  a 
"joyous  atheist,"  contented  even  in  the  attic 
where  he  makes  jumping-jacks  to  earn  his 
bread,  enjoying  life  still  as  a  spectacle,  and 
reading  his  pocket  Lucretius  as  he  waits  his 
turn  in  the  bread  line.  Smiling,  suave,  im- 
maculate in  his  threadbare  coat,  old  Brotteaux 
typifies  the  eighteenth  century  of  the  "philo- 
sophes,"  the  placid  skepticism  as  well  as  the 
grace  and  manners  of  the  ancien  regime.  His 
is  the  philosophic  nihilism  of  the  earlier  Ber- 
geret  and  of  Doctor  Trublet  (was  he  conceived 


189 

at  the  same  time?)  ;  and  he  has  no  faith  in  the 
Revolution.  "When  you  wish  to  make  men 
good  and  wise,  free,  temperate,  and  generous, 
you  are  of  necessity  led  to  the  desire  to  kill  them 
all.  Robespierre  believed  in  virtue,  he  pro- 
duced the  Reign  of  Terror:  Marat  believed  in 
justice,  he  demanded  two  hundred  thousand 
heads." 

"Look  where  you  please.  Nature  shows  us 
but  two  spectacles,  Love  and  Death."  This 
dictum  of  earlier  days  might  have  served  as 
epigraph  for  Les  Dieux  ont  soif,  so  skilfully  is 
the  carnival  of  blood  relieved  by  the  idyl  of  love. 
Even  Gamelin  loves,  even  he  repeats  with  all 
the  world  the  lyric  phrases  of  Jean- Jacques 
Rousseau.  Others  love  with  the  pagan  direct- 
ness of  the  earlier  eighteenth  century,  but  every 
one  puts  a  feverish  ardor  into  his  passion, 
knowing  how  soon  it  may  be  quenched  in  the 
crimson  stream  flowing  down  into  the  Seine- 
Otherwise  the  Revolution  does  not  exist  for 
them,  ironic  puppets  of  the  primal  force  of  life. 
Eros  is  king,  joining  lovers'  hands  through 
prison-bars,  holding  back  on  the  witness-stand 
words  that  might  have  saved;  sending  these 
aristocrats  with  a  kiss  on  their  lips,  down  the 
dusty  road  to  death,  brave  and  silent,  indifferent 


190 

as  the  pagan  Horace  to  their  impending  doom. 
For  well  they  know  that — 

"Omnes  eodem  cogimur:  omnium 
Versatur  urna:  serius  ocius 
Sors  exitura,  et  nos  in  aeternum 
Exilium  impositura  cymbae." 

Thus  the  novel  sets  forth  the  grace  of  a 
fallen  aristocracy,  a  society  ruled  by  hedonism. 
It  is  a  pagan  protest  against  the  rigid  ethics  of 
Corneille — against  that  pure  idealism  which 
makes  men  monsters  like  Gamelin.  Epicurean 
after  its  first  vanished  dream  of  a  millennium, 
this  was  just  the  period  to  fascinate  one  like 
Anatole  France:  in  1793,  the  vortex  of  events 
shortened  human  life  to  a  span  hardly  longer 
than  the  lives  of  flowers.  So  he  loves  this  age, 
loves  it  for  its  tragic  brevity — that  is  evident 
in  the  perfection  of  his  masterpiece,  so  long 
caressed  by  the  patient  graver  and  the  file.  If 
the  plot  is  still  loose,  if  the  novel  does  not  end 
at  its  real  climax,  dragging  a  bit  after  the  fall 
of  Robespierre  and  the  execution  of  Gamelin, 
the  construction  elsewhere  is  marvelous  in  its 
contexture  of  sombre  realism  and  lyric  idyl. 
Exquisite  the  modulation  of  the  rhythm,  the 
"dying  fall"  of  the  chapter-endings;  wonder- 
ful the  art  which  turns  the  commonest  incident 
to   a    symbol;   the   jumping-jacks    of   Father 


191 

Longuemare,  the  roses  heaping  the  merry  cari- 
ole,  the  carnations  blooming  in  Elodie's  win- 
dow— a  scarlet  thread  running  gaily  through 
their  story,  until  the  last  blossom  falls  at  the 
feet  of  the  doomed  lover  in  the  tumbril,  borne 
past  her  chamber  to  his  patriot's  end. 

"Maintenant  je  pourrais  bien  m'amuser  un 
peu."  Inevitably,  one  thinks  of  Renan's  ex- 
cuse, when,  his  life-work  of  research  ended,  he 
turned  his  weary  pen  to  dialogues  on  chastity 
and  euthanasia  and  dramas  like  L'Abbesse  de 
Jouarre.  At  the  unveiling  of  the  Treguier 
statue,  in  1903,  Anatole  France  quotes  this 
saying  of  his  quondam  master,  a  bon  mot  which 
might  well  have  served  him  also  to  explain  the 
less  serious  books  with  which  he  was  to  diver- 
sify his  scholarship  and  amuse  his  old  age. 

Now  he  gives  us  four  volumes  of  satire.  Fin- 
ishing his  study  of  the  Maid,  he  relieves  the 
later  intervals  of  this  task  by  a  parody,  a  bur- 
lesque history  of  France.  Written  more  rap- 
idly, because  written  more  easily,  L'lle  des  Pin- 
gouins  also  bears  the  date  1908:  but  if  Jeanne 
d'Arc  followed  the  spirit  and  method  of  Renan, 
this  mock  history  is  conceived  and  written  in 
the  manner  of  his  later  model,  the  author  of 
La  Piicelle  and  Le  Monde  comme  il  va. 


192 

A  modern  Voltaire,  Anatole  France  now 
turns  to  caricature  the  legends  he  had  loved  so 
well  in  earlier  years.  He  tells  us  of  a  certain 
Saint  Mael,  a  Breton  monk  famous  for  his  mis- 
sionary zeal.  Long  used  to  travel  over  the  seas, 
as  the  early  missionaries,  in  a  miraculous 
trough  of  stone,  he  is  tempted  by  the  Devil 
to  fit  out  this  Heaven-sent  boat  with  sails  and 
rudder  and  prow  of  wood.  So,  by  his  eager- 
ness to  reach  an  erring  flock,  he  puts  himself 
unwittingly  in  the  power  of  the  Adversary. 
A  frightful  tempest  springs  up,  and,  driven 
out  of  its  course,  the  evil  boat  carries  the  monk 
far  away  to  the  frozen  Antarctic  seas.  At  last 
the  good  man  recognizes  the  devils  blowing 
into  his  sails,  exorcises  them  with  the  sign  of 
the  cross  and,  worn  out  and  half-blinded  by 
the  spray  and  the  glittering  ice,  he  lands  safely 
on  a  little  isle.  There  he  finds  a  colony  of 
penguins,  which  he  exhorts  in  myopic  faith  as 
the  human  inhabitants  of  the  isle ;  and  hearing 
them  quack  assent  in  their  barbarian  tongue, 
he  baptizes  them  one  and  all.  Imagine  now  the 
consternation  in  Heaven,  the  confusion  among 
the  doctors  and  saints,  the  problem  suddenly 
presented  to  the  Deity.  What  is  the  effect  of 
this  baptism?  Is  the  sacrament  valid  through 
its  spirit  or  through  its  form  ?  Are  the  penguins 


193 

now  damned,  although  they  are  birds  and  not 
of  the  seed  of  Adam?  Finally,  the  necessity 
of  affirming  the  formal  virtue  of  baptism  obliges 
the  good  Lord  to  change  the  penguins  to  men, 
give  them  human  bodies  and  immortal  souls. 
So  the  repentant  saint  performs  the  miracle, 
after  which,  fearing  a  relapse  of  faith  in  his 
converts,  he  tows  the  little  island  back  to  the 
Breton  shore. 

Henceforth  this  parody  of  Saint  Brendan's 
legend  is  a  transparent  burlesque  of  our  human 
origins  and  of  French  history.  By  another 
device  of  the  crafty  Adversary,  the  Penguins 
are  clothed  and  the  female  invested  with  the 
sorcery  of  sex-illusion.  Brute  force  still  rules 
these  animals,  founding  the  institution  of  prop- 
erty, consecrating  inequality  in  opinion  and 
law.  Then  comes  the  age  of  myth:  a  devas- 
tating dragon,  personified  by  a  vigorous  bandit, 
is  led  into  captivity  through  the  "virgin"  pre- 
dicted by  Saint  Mael.  And  if  conventions  per- 
mitted, one  would  like  to  quote  from  this  Vol- 
tairian travesty  of  the  legend  of  Saint  Martha 
and  the  Tarasque,  wherein  the  slayer  (and  in- 
ventor !)  of  the  dragon  becomes  the  first  king  of 
the  Penguins,  and  the  new  Martha  their  patron 
saint.  Inimitable  too  is  the  chapter  on  the 
Penguin  Primitives,  with  its  obvious  satire  of 


194 

Ruskin  and  English  Preraphaelitism,  and  very 
significant  are  the  pages  in  which  the  author 
rehabiHtates  Virgil  from  the  quasi-conversion 
related  by  Dante,  Marhode  aiix  enfers. 

By  such  characteristic  fragments,  the  parody 
is  brought  down  to  modern  times,  to  things 
which  Anatole  France  had  seen  and  chafed 
under.  But  as  he  caricatures  Boulanger,  the 
"affair,"  and  the  corruption  of  modern  politics 
tainted  with  Clericalism,  Royalism,  and  amor- 
ous intrigue,  the  matter  of  his  text  is  suddenly 
expanded  beyond  all  proportion :  half  the  book 
is  given  over  to  these  chapters,  which  leave  the 
balder  style  of  the  chronicle  for  the  circum- 
stantial realism  of  a  novelist  or  a  modern  his- 
torian. This  may  indicate  that  the  earlier  por- 
tion was  sketched  in  before  Histoire  contem- 
poraine :  but  it  certainly  proves  the  ineffaceable 
imprint  of  a  world  seen  too  well  from  Monsieur 
Bergeret's  eyes. — Finally,  the  historian  turns 
his  gaze  to  the  future.  "Houses  could  never  be 
built  high  enough,"  he  tells  us,  "fifteen  mil- 
lions of  men  toiled  in  the  giant  city."  Built 
on  capitalism  and  industrial  oppression,  a  hu- 
man ant-hill  with  no  vision  save  the  pursuit 
of  lucre,  this  blind,  cruel,  spawning  monster 
perishes  at  the  hands  of  a  few  idealists,  a  vast 
holocaust  to  the  goddess  Anarchy.    Then  fol- 


195 

lows  a  period  of  decadence  and  barbarism: 
centuries  pass ;  wild  huntsmen  pursue  the  bear 
upon  the  site  of  the  forgotten  capital.  Cen- 
turies pass,  nomads  and  shepherds  and  rude 
farmers  live  there  in  turn.  At  last,  after  many 
invasions,  many  wars,  the  straggling  villages 
grow  to  towns,  the  straggling  towns  unite  to 
form  a  capital.  Then  "houses  could  never  be 
built  high  enough ;  fifteen  millions  of  men  toiled 
in  the  giant  city."  Thus  the  story  ends,  break- 
ing off  abruptly  its  endless  cycle  of  despair. 

Here  is  a  prophecy  not  to  be  reconciled  with 
the  optimism  of  Sur  la  pierre  blanche.  Has 
the  author  repented,  since  he  returns  now  to 
the  fatalism  first  expressed  in  Jocaste  ?  Critics 
have  called  L'lle  des  Pingoiiins  the  burial  of 
an  illusion,  finding  the  author  in  the  idealistic 
astronomer  Bidault-Coquille,  who  by  the  side 
of  Colomban  the  sociologist  (Zola),  leaves  his 
tower  to  fight  for  Pyrot  (Dreyfus),  unjustly 
accused  of  selling  eighty  thousand  bundles  of 
hay  to  a  hostile  empire.  Bidault  does  not  find 
among  the  Pyrotins  that  pure  love  of  truth 
which  spurred  him  to  action,  and  so  he  goes 
back  disheartened  to  his  tower,  glad  to  escape 
from  the  crowd  again.  "You  imagined,"  he 
says  to  himself,  "that  at  one  stroke  you  could 
establish  justice  in  your  country  and  in  the  uni- 


196 

verse.  You  were  a  brave  man,  an  honest  ideal- 
ist, but  lacking  in  the  philosophy  of  experience. 
....  And  now  that  you  have  lost  your  illusions, 
now  that  you  know  that  it  is  hard  to  redress 
wrongs  and  that  the  task  is  never  finished,  you 
return  to  your  asteroids.  You  are  right,  but 
have  no  pride  in  your  returning,  Bidault-Co- 
quille!" 

Is  this  more  than  a  moment  of  discourage- 
ment? Certainly  the  Introduction  of  the  con- 
temporaneous Jeanne  d'Arc  affirms  the  optim- 
ism of  the  author,  his  faith  in  human  progress 
and  the  coming  of  universal  peace.  But  con- 
signed to  a  book,  a  moment  of  discouragement 
seems  permanent;  a  sensitive  artist  may  dwell 
upon  defeat  until  it  crystallizes  into  a  Mephis- 
tophelian  speculum  mundi. 

"Alas,  one's  power  to  love  declines  and  dies 
away  in  old  age,  like  all  the  other  energies  of 
man,"*  said  Anatole  France  in  1881.  Did  his 
irony  lose  its  indulgence,  not  because  life  made 
him  bitter,  but  because  all  irony  corrodes  its 
vessel  in  the  end?  At  any  rate,  this  purely 
satiric  vein  goes  on:  all  the  foibles  of  human 
character  are  held  up  to  ridicule  in  his  next 
volume.  Les  sept  femmes  de  la  Barbe-bleue, 
based  on  "authentic  documents,"  is,  to  be  sure, 

*Syhestre  Bonnard,  p.  98. 


197 

merely  a  mock-scientific  investigation  of  the 
legend,  rehabilitating  the  worthy  gentleman 
whose  matrimonial  experiments  ended  fatally 
— through  the  vices  of  his  wives !  But  the  other 
tales  of  the  volume  are  far  more  pungent  than 
this  satire  of  women,  which  only  proves  that 
Anatole  France  is  far  from  the  days  when  he 
retold  legends  not  as  a  satirist  but  as  an  artist. 
Take  for  instance  the  next  story,  Le  miracle 
du  grand  Saint-Nicolas.  The  parody  of  scien- 
tific method  continues  in  the  care  with  which 
the  hero  of  the  nursery  rhyme  is  distinguished 
from  the  Lycian  bishop,  but  the  satire  of  the 
story  cuts  more  deeply.  According  to  popular 
legend.  Saint  Nicholas  resuscitated  from  the 
innkeeper's  pork  barrel  three  tender  children 
which  mine  host  had  killed  and  salted  down 
seven  years  before.  Anatole  France  develops 
the  theme  and,  like  Voltaire  in  one  of  his 
"Tales,"  shows  the  results  of  this  intervention. 
Adopted  by  the  bishop,  all  three  boys  live  and 
grow  up,  but  one  robs  him  and  despoils  his 
church,  another  debauches  his  beloved  niece, 
while  the  third,  taking  orders  in  spite  of  his 
advice,  sows  in  his  bishopric  a  frightful  heresy, 
the  scandal  of  which  drives  the  good  prelate 
out  of  his  palace,  excommunicate,  to  atone  for 
it  in  the  solitude  of  the  hills.    There  he  meets 


196 

another  penitent,  converted  by  the  miracle — the 
innkeeper.  The  inscrutable  ways  of  Providence 
are  at  last  explained ! 

Then  there  is  the  story  of  Sleeping  Beauty, 
or  rather  of  the  dissolute  minister  of  the  royal 
court  who,  after  his  secular  slumber  as  before, 
still  denies  the  existence  of  fairies.  This  is  a 
satire  of  cheap  skepticism,  the  skepticism  of  the 
French  middle  classes.  But  better  than  this 
piece  of  eighteenth-century  badinage,  whose 
humor  displays  an  unusual  indelicacy  of  taste, 
is  the  tale  which  fills  the  last  half  of  the  book, 
La  Chemise. 

Transplanted  to  a  modern  setting,  this  is 
simply  the  old  story  of  the  royal  Malade  imagi- 
naire  who  was  told  to  endue  the  shirt  of  a 
perfectly  happy  man.  The  King,  who  seems  to 
be  drawn  after  the  pleasure-seeking  Leopold  of 
Belgium,  has  no  evident  reason  for  melancholia. 
His  well-managed  constitutional  government 
gives  him  little  trouble,  for  having  found  his 
actions  ineflfective,  or  productive  of  the  wrong 
effects,  he  has  learned  to  leave  it  entirely  to  his 
ministers.  He  is  free  to  follow  his  own  pleas- 
ures, as  he  has  always  done.  But  he  is  bored, 
bored  with  everything,  ridden  by  melancholy 
as  by  the  Old  Man  of  the  Sea.  He  loses  sleep 
and  appetite,  suffers  vague  pains,  which  in- 


199 

crease  in  spite  of  every  treatment.  Finally  he 
seeks  aid  from  a  new  physician,  a  believer  in 
natural  remedies,  who  decides  that  the  neces- 
sary tonic  is  a  shirt  imbued  with  an  optimist's 
excess  of  joy.  Two  courtiers  take  up  the  quest 
of  the  shirt,  or  rather  the  quest  of  the  happy 
man.  But  the  noble  lord  who  is  first  approached 
secretly  laments  that  he  is  not  yet  a  marquis, 
the  popular  orator  regrets  that  he  is  not  an 
aristocrat.  An  heroic  duke,  the  savior  of  his 
country,  is  senile  and  the  victim  of  his  servants ; 
one  millionaire  is  a  dyspeptic  and  another  lives 
in  fear  of  being  robbed.  The  connoisseur,  in 
his  palace  filled  with  treasures,  is  vexed  by  a 
chimney-stack  which  spoils  his  view,  the  ladies' 
favorite  is  mated  to  an  old  hag.  One  fears 
death,  being  a  Jansenist,  another  because  he  is 
an  Epicurean.  The  famous  musician  is  secretly 
jealous  of  the  popular  song-writer.  One  happy 
man  they  do  find,  but  he  has  just  taken  the 
resolution  to  die.  Meanwhile  the  King  is  sink- 
ing fast;  in  desperation,  a  huge  commission 
now  examines  hundreds  of  men  a  day.  Women 
are  excluded,  for  the  prescription  must  be  fol- 
lowed literally.  Besides,  as  one  of  the  courtiers 
observes,  "in  our  class  they  do  not  bring  up 
their  children,  do  not  direct  their  households, 
know  nothing,  do  nothing,  and  kill  themselves 


200 

with  fatigue;  they  consume  themselves  in  shi- 
ning; theirs  is  only  a  candle's  life."  Finally, 
after  a  search  in  the  remotest  parts  of  the  king- 
dom has  yielded  but  one  hopeful  case,  a  chari- 
table priest,  and  he  has  confessed  the  secret 
anguish  of  his  loss  of  faith,  they  discover  a 
poor  half-witted  vagabond,  careless  and  merry 
as  the  day  is  long.  Yes,  he  is  happy — he  admits 
the  condition  although  he  does  not  know  the 
word ;  but  when  they  offer  him  a  fortune  for  his 
shirt,  he  hasn't  any! 

This  is  the  very  whip-lash  of  Voltaire. 
Wielded  gracefully  but  lightly  by  Jerome  Coig- 
nard,  its  strokes  had  gained  force  under  the 
hand  of  Bergeret;  until  the  master's  gymnastic 
swiftness  was  reenforced  by  something  of  his 
terrible  vigor — something  of  that  sarcastic 
strength  which  always  lifted  from  his  victim's 
back  the  bleeding  strip  of  skin.  But  Voltaire's 
influence,  persistent  as  it  is  upon  the  later  irony 
of  Anatole  France,  is  mingled  and  diluted  in  all 
these  books  with  that  of  other  humorists,  hu- 
morists more  likely  to  amuse  than  that  terrible 
postillion  of  humanity.  Like  Doctor  Trublet, 
like  Professor  Bergeret,  Anatole  France  is  be- 
come a  great  lover  of  Rabelais  and  his  kind. 

"Oh  Milesian  tale-writers,  oh  subtle  Petro- 
nius,  oh  my  Noel  du  Fail,"  exclaims  the  Pro- 


201 

fessor,  seeking  oblivion  from  present  tribula- 
tion on  the  book-shelf  where,  bound  in  leaves 
of  missals,  stand  his  Pantagruel,  his  Cent  Nou- 
velles  nouvelles,  his  copy  of  Des  Periers; — 
"Oh  precursors  of  Jean  de  la  Fontaine !  What 
teacher  of  men  was  wiser  and  better  than  you, 
so  commonly  called  scallywags !  Oh  my  bene- 
factors !  You  have  taught  me  the  true  science 
of  life,  a  benevolent  contempt  of  men."" 

Such  a  devotion  could  not  fail  to  bring  its 
fruit.  Rabelais  inspired  Bergeret's  fable,  Les 
Trublions,  and  also  the  modern  fabliau  Jean 
Coq  et  Jean  Mouton.  His  love  of  the  apologue 
again  crops  out  mUIledesPingoiiins,  and  with 
it,  the  long  comic  enumerations  so  dear  to  the 
Cure  of  Meudon.  Henceforth,  this  becomes 
one  of  the  disciple's  favorite  tricks  of  style,  a 
device  particularly  frequent  in  the  volume  of 
satiric  fables  containing  La  Chemise.  And  ob- 
viously, Rabelais  inspired  the  sparkling  Molie- 
resque  Comedie  de  celui  qui  epousa  une  femme 
muettQ  ( 1913),  the  story  of  a  book-lover  forced 
to  seek  compensatory  deafness  from  the  phy- 
sicians who  had  loosed  the  maddening  tongue 
of  his  spouse. 

Of  course  one  may  make  of  Rabelais  too 
constant  a  companion.    Great  as  he  is,  he  knew 

•^  Mannequin  d' osier,  p.  160 ;  L'Anneau,  p.  182. 


202 

no  taste,  and  even  an  artistic  nature  may  be 
swept  away  by  his  rollicking  humor  into  a  li- 
cense which  ceases  to  be  unconscious  and  inno- 
cent upon  the  lips  of  a  modern.  So  it  happened 
with  Anatole  France,  when  age  and  ennui  had 
broken  down  the  bounds  of  his  earlier  classi- 
cism; and  the  result  of  this  evolution  was  Les 
Contes  de  Jacques  Tournebroche  (1909)  and 
La  Revolte  des  anges  (1914). 

The  first  of  these  is  a  collection  of  amusing 
but  trivial  tales  and  sketches,  at  times  gross  as 
Le  joyeux  Buffalmacco,  and  mostly  written  in 
the  French  of  the  sixteenth  century.  Remark- 
able for  the  ease  with  which  he  handles  this 
archaic  idiom,  they  are  quite  lacking  in  the 
philosophic  depth  which  alone  might  excuse 
their  lapses  into  broad  humor.  The  author  is 
simply  amusing  himself,  giving  free  vent  to 
that  love  of  the  scabrous  which  the  scholar,  so 
bound  by  constraint  in  ordinary  life,  sometimes 
displays  in  the  smoking-room  of  his  favorite 
club.  But  in  La  Revolte  des  anges  the  humor 
has  its  moral — its  implication  rather — for  any- 
thing like  a  conventional  moral  will  be  invisible 
except  to  pagans  like  the  author. 

This  implication  is  enwrapped  in  a  Mani- 
chean  fantasy  such  as  inspired  L'humaine  tra- 
gedie.    "The  Revolt  of  the  Angels"  is  the  story 


203 

of  a  new  conspiracy  against  Heaven,  against 
the  Jahveh  of  the  Old  Testament  and  the  Tal- 
mud, whom  Anatole  France,  like  Renan,  sees 
as  a  cruel  despotic  demiurge,  opposed  to  that 
science  and  enlightenment  which  he  personifies 
in  Lucifer.  This  dualistic  theory  of  the  world 
had  interested  him  since  he  wrote  Thais;  now, 
with  contemporary  Paris  as  a  setting,  he  de- 
scribes the  plot  suggested  to  one  of  earth's 
fallen  angels  by  the  many- voiced  volumes  of  a 
library  filled  with  theology,  science,  and  philos- 
ophy. The  chief  conspirators  are  cherubim, 
seraphim,  and  archangels,  drawn  to  earth  by 
motives  often  far  from  angelic,  and  living  there 
as  Russian  nihilists,  musicians,  Bohemians  of 
every  sort.  But  more  than  this,  their  historian 
makes  them  subject  to  very  human  frailties,  the 
everlasting  frailties  of  Bergeret's  favorite  tales, 
and  to  their  clear  deterministic  vision  opposes 
the  moral  prejudices  of  men,  so  that  the  young 
Frenchman  involved  in  their  circle  becomes  in 
the  end  protector  to  his  own  guardian  angel. 
We  learn  of  their  secular  role  in  the  history  of 
man,  who  owes  to  them  his  progress,  his  learn- 
ing, and  his  civilization;  and  the  chapters  in 
which  the  flute-player  Nazaire  (Pan)  relates 
in  dreamy  recollection  the  long  course  of  celes- 
tial and  human  history  are  perhaps  the  best  in 


204 

the  book.  Here  we  are  told  that  Lucifer's  at- 
tack upon  Heaven  had  failed  only  because  of 
the  thunderbolts  launched  against  him;  but 
with  that  secret  of  the  demiurge  laid  bare  by 
the  Quaker  Franklin,  this  disparity  need  no 
longer  exist.  So  the  conspirators  prepare  a 
great  store  of  bombs,  organize  their  force,  and 
seek  the  Adversary  to  implore  his  leadership. 
Then  Lucifer  has  a  dream,  a  vision  in  which 
he  does  conquer  Heaven  and  drive  out  his 
enemy,  only  to  find  that  nothing  is  accomplished 
after  all.  For  with  the  recognition  of  Rome 
he  only  grows  cruel  as  the  power  he  had  hated, 
while  opposition  now  makes  his  enemy  tolerant 
and  just.  So,  realizing  that  victory  has  merely 
inverted  their  roles,  that  wars  only  engender 
wars,  he  refuses  the  profifered  generalship, 
preferring  the  lowly  scene  of  his  past  labors 
to  Heaven,  and  the  greater  victory  over  ignor- 
ance and  fear  to  any  conquest  of  the  skies. 

The  meaning  of  the  story,  full  of  repeated 
epigrams  and  "effects"  and  vaguely  recalling 
La  Rotisserie  without  its  taste  and  moderation, 
is  thus  the  uselessness  of  war.  Such  was  the 
message  this  modern  Lucian  once  more  gave 
his  country — and  Europe — in  February,  1914. 
Six  months  later  the  Republic — and  Europe — 
were  plunged  into  the  world  war. 


CHAPTER  X 


POSTSCRIPT  AND   CONCLUSION. 


X 


IN  the  beautiful  little  Villa  Said,  with  its 
stained-glass  windows  opening  toward  the 
Bois  de  Boulogne  —  a  scholar's  retreat  filled 
with  books  and  works  of  art  chosen  to  reflect 
the  period  which  he  is  studying — the  pan- 
demonium of  war  interrupted  an  old  man's 
quiet.  He  answered  the  call  like  a  hero  and 
a  philosopher.  In  that  first  wild  hour  of  pas- 
sionate hatred,  when  the  whole  Republic  was 
clamoring  for  vengeance,  he  wrote  a  letter 
recalling  his  fellow-citizens  to  moderation,  urg- 
ing Frenchmen  not  to  forget  that  humanity  is 
above  all  nations.  Then,  when  the  real  peril  of 
invasion  made  patriotism  paramount,  and  the 
storm  of  criticism  and  obloquy  broke  upon  his 
head,  the  veteran  of  1870  put  aside  his  pen  and 
offered  his  sword.  Too  old  to  pass  the  physical 
examination  in  October,  he  was  allowed  to  help 
his  country  in  other  ways,  and  his  next  book, 
written  and  sold  for  the  profit  of  the  wounded, 


208 

was  a  glorification  of  its  defenders  fighting  or 
fallen,  Sur  la  voie  glorieuse  (1915). 

Pacifist  that  he  is,  Anatole  France  at  once 
saw  and  admitted  the  necessity  of  war:  "We 
must  destroy  from  top  to  bottom  the  military 
power  of  Germany,  take  from  that  barbarous 
people  all  possibility  of  pursuing  their  dream 
of  a  world  empire."  For  "they  have  taken 
from  the  art  of  warfare  all  its  laws,  all  its  mod- 
eration, all  the  humanity  still  left  in  it.  They 
had  killed  peace,  now  they  are  killing  war.  They 
are  making  war  a  monster  too  ugly  to  live." 
He  knows  now  that  "it  is  criminal  to  make  ap- 
peals to  peace,  to  desire  peace  until  the  forces 
of  oppression  are  destroyed" :  indeed,  one  letter 
even  preaches  the  duties  of  neutrals  toward  the 
champions  of  civilization,  united  to  the  last 
socialist  among  them.  Every  page  of  the  vol- 
ume breathes  the  same  fire  of  patriotism,  from 
the  Christmas  letter  to  the  soldiers  through 
the  final  appeal  to  Frenchmen  on  their  national 
holiday:  "What  you  are  defending  is  your 
native  land,  that  smiling  fertile  land,  the  fairest 
in  the  world:  it  is  your  fields,  your  meadows 

What  you  are  defending  is  your  own 

church-belfry,  your  roofs  of  brick  and  slate, 
the  tombs  of  your  fathers  and  the  cradles  of 
your  children.    What  you  are  defending  is  our 


209 

proud  cities,  rearing  along  the  river-banks  the 
monuments  of  generations ....  our  glory  of  old. 
.  . .  .What  you  are  defending  is  our  mortal  pat- 
rimony, our  mores,  our  customes,  our  laws,  our 
habits,  our  beliefs,  our  traditions :  'tis  the  works 
of  our  sculptors,  our  architects,  our  artists.  . .  . 
'tis  the  song  of  our  musicians ;  it  is  the  mother- 
tongue  which  for  eight  centuries  flowed  un- 
ceasing from  the  lips  of  our  poets,  our  orators, 
our  historians,  our  philosophers,  'tis  the  science 
of  man  and  nature ....  What  you  are  defending 
is  the  French  genius,  which  gave  the  world 
light  and  brought  to  the  nations  liberty.  What 
you  are  defending.  . .  .is  not  only  France  but 
Europe." 

One  would  like  to  quote  in  their  entirety 
these  final  pages,  worthy  of  the  address  to  La 
petite  ville  which  is  here  reprinted  from  Pierre 
Noziere,  pages  admirable  in  their  piety  toward 
the  glorious  past  and  the  future  of  the  father- 
land. But  no  less  admirable  is  the  devotion 
of  their  author,  the  arch-skeptic,  sweeping  him 
again,  at  seventy,  into  the  resistless  stream  of 
action;  no  less  wonderful  is  the  faith  and  en- 
thusiasm which  revived  in  the  would-be  volun- 
teer the  generous  defender  of  Dreyfus,  nearly 
twenty  years  before 


210 

"We  do  not  remain  one  moment  the  same, 
and  yet  we  never  become  different  from  what 
we  are,"^  said  Anatole  France  at  thirty.  But 
what  is  the  stable  element  in  this  restless  soul? 
Is  it  the  poet  or  the  naturalistic  novelist,  the 
dilettante  or  the  patient  historian,  the  mystic 
or  the  rabid  anticlerical,  the  amiable  skeptic  or 
the  bitter  polemic,  the  cynical  satirist  or  the 
reformer,  the  scoffer  at  men  or  the  humani- 
tarian and  builder  of  a  new  Utopia?  What  is 
constant  in  this  changing  kaleidoscope  of  phases 
or  moods? 

Halt  your  kaleidoscope  at  any  figure,  and 
take  it  apart.  Some  of  the  colors  are  covered 
by  others,  but  underneath  lie  all  the  elements 
of  every  pattern.  Take  Anatole  France  in  any 
of  his  phases,  and  you  find,  balanced  or  con- 
flicting or  dominated  one  by  the  other,  his  two 
basic  elements:  an  imagination  essentially  ro- 
mantic and  a  Voltairian  keenness  of  analysis. 
And  under  all  their  changes  of  pattern  plays 
the  sensibilite  nerveuse  which  he  early  noted  in 
Racine:  in  other  words  the  artist's  tempera- 
ment, vibrant  and  sensuous,  richly  responsive 
but  a  shade  too  delicately  poised — a  nature 
which  after  its  first  contact  with  life  is  bound  to 

^  Genie  latin,  p.  309. 


211 

turn  away  from  its  ugliness  to  that  softer  re- 
flection of  reality  given  by  literature  and  art. 

"There  are  times  when  everything  surprises 
me,  times  when  the  simplest  things  give  me  the 
thrill  of  a  mystery/'^  he  writes  at  forty.  This 
is  the  faculty  which  makes  the  poet,  the  mystic, 
the  curious  and  eager  dilettante.  "Imagination 
turns  into  an  artist  a  man  whose  feeling  is 
stirred,  and  a  brave  man  into  a  hero."^  This 
is  the  faculty  which  makes  the  idealist  and  the 
dreamer  of  reform. 

Fond  of  the  marvelous  and  the  exotic,  enam- 
ored of  the  past,  subjective  and  sentimental 
beneath  all  his  irony,  finding  in  memory  "une 
Muse  divine,"*  his  imagination  is  undeniably 
romantic.  But  against  that  influence  works 
the  acid  of  an  intellect  analytic  as  Voltaire's, 
solving  or  dissolving  all;  and  if  its  rational 
activity,  which  gives  us  the  scholar,  the  philos- 
opher, and  the  satirist,  does  not  invariably  end 
in  cynicism,  one  may  be  reasonably  sure  of  that 
result  in  a  temperament  self-betrayed  by  its 
visions  and  wounded  through  its  abnormal  sen- 
sitiveness. Before  that  final  change,  however, 
his  intellect  finds  pause  on  Montaigne's  pillow 
of  doubt,  and  happily  warmed  by  imagination, 
enjoys  for  over  a  decade  a  sage's  dream. 

2  Livre  de  mon  ami,  p.  6.      » Ibid.,  p.  279.      *  L'Anneau,  p.  190. 


212 

Who,  could  we  choose,  would  not  live  the 
golden  forties  with  Anatole  France?  In  those 
cloister  days,  protected  like  his  long  adoles- 
cence, even  the  "nervous  sensibility"  of  the 
artist  combines  suavely  with  his  mental  facul- 
ties, urging  fancy  and  intellect  alike  to  explore. 
Rooted  in  an  ardently  sensitive  nature,  "that 
high  curiosity,  which," — as  he  tells  us, — "was 
to  cause  the  confusion  and  the  joy  of  his  life, 
devoting  him  to  the  quest  of  that  which  one 
never  finds,'"*  now  leads  the  poet  and  the  scholar 
to  a  past  infinitely  more  attractive  than  the 
present.  An  egoist,  an  intellectual  romanticist, 
loving  the  past  less  for  truth's  sake  than  for  the 
escape  it  offers  to  his  imagination,  where  it  re- 
flects itself  as  richly  as  a  woman's  beauty  in 
a  Renaissance  mirror,  he  loves  too  the  ideas 
of  the  past,  the  ideas  of  the  present,  the  marvels 
of  science,  the  Utopias  of  the  reformers,  the 
poetry  in  all  of  man's  pageant  of  philosophy, 
whereof  he  believes  not  a  single  word.  We  may 
rightly  blame  the  selfishness  of  this  attitude,  but 
even  an  idle  curiosity  may  produce  for  us  the 
gift  of  beauty.  So  with  this  intellectual  hedon- 
ist: in  his  richly  furnished  mind  each  new  im- 
pression echoes  and  reechoes,  until  somewhere 
down  the  gallery  of  memory  it  strikes  to  music 

"  Pierre  Nosiire,  p.  14. 


213 

a  forgotten  harp  or  violin.  For  Anatole  France 
lives  in  his  memory  as  he  lives  in  art  and 
reality. 

Yes,  reality.  Even  this  skeptical  monk  of 
letters  cannot  completely  shut  out  the  real 
world,  the  world  of  feeling  and  experience. 
"Like  others,  skeptics  too  are  subjected  to  all 
the  illusions  of  the  universal  mirage,  they  too 
are  the  playthings  of  appearances;  sometimes 
vain  forms  cause  them  to  suffer  cruelly.  Use- 
less for  us  to  see  the  nothingness  of  life;  a 
flower  will  sometimes  suffice  to  fill  it  to  over- 
flowing.'" 

There,  surely,  the  conflict  of  his  temperament 
stands  revealed.  Impossible  for  him  to  recon- 
cile his  intellect,  his  pessimism,  with  the  sen- 
suously imaginative  love  of  beauty  which  draws 
him — with  that  passion  which  fires  his  artist's 
blood  before  life's  tragic  moments  of  beauty — 
brief  foam-flowers  lapsing  into  waves  of  ugli- 
ness or  a  flood-tide  of  indifference  or  despair. 
Impossible  to  reconcile  this  conflict,  which 
makes  Bergeret,  beset  by  provincial  vulgarity, 
"dream  of  a  villa  with  a  white  loggia  set  above 
a  lake  of  blue,  where,  with  his  friends,  he  might 
converse  in  the  perfume  of  myrtles,  at  the  hour 
when  the  moon  comes  forth  to  bathe  in  a  sky 

8  Vie  litteraire,  II.  175. 


214 

pure  as  the  gaze  of  the  good  gods  and  soft  as 
the  breath  of  the  goddesses."^  Awakened  Hke 
Bergeret  by  stones  crashing  through  his  library 
window,  an  oversensitive  type  will  turn  back 
to  his  books,  longing,  at  least  momentarily,  for 
the  hermit's  life  which  will  remove  him  defi- 
nitely from  the  incongruities  of  a  world  not 
made  for  romanticists." 

So  Bonnard  is  transformed  into  Bergeret, 
who,  despite  his  worship  of  ataraxy,  reveals  a 
latent  capacity  for  emotion — the  romantic  sen- 
sitiveness— in  his  praise  of  irony  and  pity.  But 
in  the  course  of  life  one  gets  used  to  living, 
learns  to  love  life,  to  love  it  even  in  its  ugliness, 
like  the  atheist  in  La  Chemise.  "Moi,  j'aime  la 
vie,  la  vie  de  cette  terre,  la  vie  telle  qu'elle  est, 
la  chienne  de  vie.""  So  the  mature  Anatole 
France  attains  the  pessimistic  tranquillity  of 
Doctor  Trublet  and  Brotteaux  des  Ilettes,  in 
whom  imagination  has  at  last  yielded  to  in- 
tellect, philosophers  grown  serene  with  age,  no 
longer  lamenting  Bergeret's  dream-villa,  but 
content  to  gather  uncomplaining  the  crumbs 
of  beauty  life  offers  by  the  way. 

In  fine,  one  cannot  help  thinking  that  Anatole 
France  looked  into  the  mirror  when  he  drew 

'  Mannequin,  p.  33.  *  Livre  de  mon  ami,  p.  69. 

•  Barbe-bleue,  p.  258. 


215 

Dechartre  in  Le  Lys  rouge.  Like  the  artist, 
he  too  is  "a  restless  mobile  spirit,  egoistic  and 
passionate,  eager  to  give  himself,  prompt  to 
withdraw,  loving  himself  generously  in  all  the 
beauty  which  he  finds  in  the  world.  "^^  He  too 
is  one  who  lives  for  self,  for  the  pleasures  his 
fancy  and  his  intellect  and  his  temperament 
can  give.  This  makes  him  an  artist,  and  this 
gives  him  the  defects  of  the  artist.  "There  are 
people  who  are  masters  of  their  impressions, 
but  I  cannot  imitate  them.""  So  he  is  the  vic- 
tim of  his  qualities,  unable  to  coordinate  or 
discipline  either  intellect  or  imagination.  "I 
have  never  been  a  real  observer,  for  the  ob- 
server must  have  a  system  to  guide  him,  and  I 
have  no  system  at  all.  The  observer  directs  his 
vision;  the  spectator  lets  himself  be  led  by  his 
eyes.'"^ 

The  results  of  this  yielding  to  self  are  shown 
in  his  art.  All  his  longer  stories  are  formless : 
lack  of  true  constructive  ability  is  the  real  basis 
of  his  preference  for  the  tale.  Unable  to  force 
his  talents  or  coordinate  them,  he  requires 
twenty  years  to  finish  his  one  piece  of  serious 
scholarship.  But  discipline  would  have  curbed 
that  universal  curiosity  which  is  his  life's  chief 

lo  Loc.  cit.,  p.  99.  "  Pierre  Nozi^re,  p.  275 

^^  Livre  de  mon  ami,  p.  115. 


216 

interest;  the  dilettante  cannot  subordinate  his 
talents,  the  skeptic  can  build  no  system  save  the 
skepticism  which  indulgently  tolerates  them  all. 

A  man  of  moods,  living  after  his  moods,  his 
subjectivity  will  always  limit  his  creative  imag- 
ination. His  best  characters — the  only  truly 
living  characters  of  his  novels — are  invariably 
"portraits  of  the  artist."  Aside  from  that,  he 
can  only  draw  directly  from  life — as  he  did 
with  Choulette — or  sketch  a  figure  cleverly 
characterized  by  the  externals  which  impress 
his  sympathy  or  his  impassive  hate.  Rather 
significant,  in  this  connection,  is  his  denial  of 
the  creative  imagination:  "All  our  ideas  come 
to  us  from  the  senses,  and  imagination  consists, 
not  in  creating,  but  in  assembling  ideas."^^  So, 
too,  he  defends  plagiarism  and  makes  creation 
a  matter  of  style :  "Ideas  belong  to  everybody, 
but  as  a  thought  has  no  value  save  through 
its  form,  to  give  a  new  form  to  an  old  thought 
is  art  in  its  entirety  and  the  only  creation  pos- 
sible to  humanity." 

Yet  it  would  be  easy  to  push  this  criticism 
too  far.  The  originality  of  Anatole  France 
is  to  depict  his  multiple  self,  to  mould  figures 
into  which  he  can  breathe  his  own  ideas,  and  to 
make  them  of  enduring  metal  rather  than  the 

^^  Ibid.,  p.  280. 


217 

usual  sawdust  or  straw.  Subjective  portraits 
as  they  are,  Sylvestre  Bonnard  and  the  genial 
Abbe,  Professor  Bergeret,  Doctor  Trublet  and 
Brotteaux  are  enough  to  compensate  for  his 
poverty  in  creation,  which  is  supplemented  by 
a  memory  which  makes  his  brain  the  sum  of 
all  he  has  ever  been.  For  Anatole  France  lives 
in  his  own  past  as  he  lives  in  the  past  of  human- 

To  impose  no  rein  upon  imagination  or  in- 
tellect, to  avoid  discipline  and  coordination  of 
one's  talents  to  a  single  end,  to  follow  the  self 
where  it  listeth,  is  the  mark  of  the  intellectual 
Epicurean.  And  perhaps  we  may  even  drop 
the  adjective !  "Let  us  not  listen  to  the  priests 
who  teach  the  excellence  of  suffering,"  he  tells 
an  audience  in  propria  persona,  "for  it  is  joy 
which  is  good ....  Let  us  not  fear  joy,  and 
when  a  beautiful  thing  or  a  smiling  thought 
offers  us  pleasure,  let  us  not  refuse  it."^*  Need- 
less to  cite  proofs:  indications  of  his  pagan 
sensuousness  are  frequent  enough  throughout 
his  work,  particularly  in  the  growing  license 
of  the  later  books.  That  fact  alone  shows  the 
breakdown  of  pure  hedonism  as  an  intellectual 
ideal.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  here  we  find 
the  very  quality  which,  at  its  best  and  under 

^*  Opinions  sociales,  p.  71. 


218 

control,  creates  his  finest  prose:  it  is  this  sen- 
suous vibrancy  that  gives  such  an  atmospheric 
afterglow  to  his  pages,  which  stir  the  senses 
and  trouble  the  soul  like  the  poignantly  fleeting 
beauty  of  a  sunset  sky.  It  is  a  glamor  we  can 
only  feel,  created  by  one  who  "would  rather 
feel  than  understand.'"* 

An  Epicurean  gifted  with  an  active  mind,  a 
restless  soul  ever  seeking  the  unknown,  will  of 
course  enjoy  a  longer  cycle  of  pleasures  than 
a  mere  sensual  hedonist.  "One  wearies  of 
everything  except  the  joys  of  comprehending." 
But  "books  trouble  restless  souls,"^*  and  though 
comprehension  remains  a  pleasure  in  the  long 
ranges  of  the  mind,  when  it  comes  home  again 
to  self  its  joys  are  turned  to  torment.  "Our 
ignorance  of  our  own  raison  d'etre  must  always 
be  a  source  of  melancholy  and  disgust.""  When 
youth  is  gone  and  self-centered  intellect  alone 
remains,  dissolving  that  hope  and  illusion  which 
is  the  spiritual  basis  of  life,  when  the  bitter 
skeptic  has  definitely  put  down  the  poet  and  the 
idealist,  he  must  reaffirm  himself  by  action,  and 
the  cloistered  Epicurean  knows  no  form  of  ac- 
tion but  writing.  Even  the  skeptic  must  write 
— write  to  regain  an  illusion  for  living.     He 

"  Vie  littiraire,  II,  191.  "  Ihid.,  I,  vii.. 

^"^  Jar  din,  p.  67. 


219 

may  not  know  whether  the  world  exists,  but  as 
an  artist  he  does  know  that  his  art  exists  ab- 
solutely. We  must  all  believe:  the  very  gym- 
nosophist,  sitting  in  mud  on  the  Ganges  banks, 
hugs  a  negative  belief  beneath  his  squalid  im- 
mobility. We  must  believe  and  act,  or  die: 
"Whatever  be  our  philosophic  doubts,  we  are 
forced  to  act  in  life  as  if  we  had  no  doubts 
at  all." 

So  like  the  homunculus  of  Faust,  the  roman- 
tic Pyrrhonist  yields  to  life's  imperative  call. 
He  turns  to  his  desk,  and  there  makes  a  stand 
against  the  flux  of  appearances  which  Herac- 
litus  first  taught  by  the  Ionian  sea.  He  ex- 
presses himself,  like  all  of  us;  and  it  is  well 
that  his  generous  impulse  toward  self-expres- 
sion should  seek  instinctive  form.  He  may  ex- 
cuse his  inconsistency  by  saying,  like  Anatole 
France,  that  ''it  is  better  to  speak  of  beautiful 
things  than  not  to  speak  at  all,"  but  at  heart 
he  knows  that  he  is  only  the  blind  instrument 
of  the  light  that  is  in  him,  the  slave  of  a  Word 
that  must  be  made  flesh  for  the  salvation  of 
his  soul. 

And  thus,  even  in  his  cloister,  the  artist  like 
the  philosopher  justifies  his  existence  to  the 
world.  He  is  judged  by  his  results.  If  the 
man  of  stronger  passion  and  simpler  mind — the 


220 

man  of  action  —  finds  his  self-expression  in 
fighting  the  universe  without,  his  broader  vis- 
ion and  more  timorous  judgment  will  retire 
from  that  unequal  struggle  with  an  age  of  low 
ideals,  to  find  a  field  of  action  in  the  universe 
within.  He  will  live,  not  in  life  but  in  books, 
that  agreeable  dilution  of  life,  which  even  a 
world  of  "service"  may  well  allow  to  those  who 
distil  honey  for  its  delight.  And  if,  as  with 
Anatole  France,  his  is  too  vital  a  temperament 
to  stay  there  forever,  if  finally  the  same  nervous 
sensitiveness  which  had  led  him  to  art  brings 
him  out  of  his  study  in  generous  pity  for  the 
oppressed,  we  must  sympathize  with  him  re- 
turning in  disillusion.  Not  that  such  a  man 
needs  it :  he  still  has,  to  console  him  behind  his 
study  doors,  the  intellectual  life,  the  much- 
needed  critical  spirit  which  alone  will  make  the 
liberty  of  our  children's  world.  And  some  day, 
reviewing  his  work  and  noting  in  his  later  loss 
of  poise  the  brand  of  the  conflict,  posterity  will 
regret  that  Anatole  France  did  not  stay  in  his 
library,  content  to  remain  one  of  those  "for 
whom  the  universe  is  only  ink  and  paper,"  con- 
soled by  the  fact  that  ink  and  paper  and  broken 
marble  is  all  that  is  left  of  those  who  laid  the 
foundations  of  modern  Europe  in  the  little  Attic 
town.    To  keep  to  his  books,  to  shut  the  door 


221 

Upon  the  petty  struggle,  to  hold  his  universal 
curiosity  and  his  universal  sympathy  down  to 
the  definite  task  of  criticism — there  lay  the 
way  out  for  Anatole  France.  That  was  Sainte- 
Beuve's  solution  of  his  own  similar  problem: 
"J'eventre  les  morts  pour  chasser  mon  spleen." 

Of  course,  such  a  philosophy  has  its  limita- 
tions. After  all,  the  beauty  of  art  is  a  symbolic 
beauty.  Its  larger  interest  lies  in  its  signifi- 
cance :  the  masterpiece  crystallizes  a  type  of  the 
human  spirit  arrested  at  a  vital  stage.  In  the 
calm  of  the  Greek  marbles,  in  the  smile  of  Mona 
Lisa,  in  the  patient  niggling  realism  of  the 
Dutch  school,  a  whole  age  is  revealed,  a  phase 
of  humanity  caught  and  fixed  for  all  the  gen- 
erations to  come.  What  is  real  in  the  contrast 
between  Watteau's  suavity  and  Millet's  rude 
force  is  the  more  definite  contrast  sensed  in  the 
age  and  the  people,  in  the  silent  multitudes  be- 
hind the  artists.  This  matrix,  this  mass  of 
human  flesh,  voiceless  and  inert,  forgotten  un- 
less it  find  immortality  in  such  a  masterpiece, 
must  always  be  the  critic's  background:  he 
paints  a  portrait,  but  if  chosen  rightly,  the  face 
sums  up  the  spirit  of  the  age. 

Are  we  justified  in  finding  such  a  type  in 
Anatole  France  ?  Certainly  not,  if  in  his  work 
be  sought  a  literal  reflection  of  his  larger  back- 


222 

ground,  a  panorama  of  life  such  as  is  revealed 
in  the  monumental  creation  of  a  Balzac.  To  be 
sure,  something  of  this  kind  of  realism  may  be 
found  in  Histoire  contemporaine  and  others  of 
his  modern  novels.  But  from  a  philosophic 
standpoint,  these  are  far  less  significant  than 
Thais  or  the  tales,  which,  under  the  mask  of 
history,  present  symbolically  a  spiritual  and 
intellectual  portrait  of  the  later  nineteenth  cen- 
tury in  France. 

Anatole  France  typifies  his  age  in  its  dom- 
inant interest,  the  historical  spirit.  Revealed  to 
us  by  Walter  Scott,  developed  by  romanticists 
eager  to  follow  imagination  in  a  flight  from 
reality — fortified,  in  Flaubert  and  his  school, 
by  archeology  and  psychology,  the  great  mod- 
ern study  finds  in  this  writer  a  characteristic 
devotee.  His  keen  perception  of  human  iden- 
tity beneath  all  the  manifold  difiFerences  of  time 
and  place  teaches  him  that  man's  duty  is  to 
rewrite  history :  yet,  despite  an  increasing  real- 
ism, he  is  no  dupe  of  the  pseudoscientific  school 
of  historians.  To  the  end  he  remains  a  critic 
and  an  artist,  re-creating  the  past  through  in- 
sight and  imagination. 

He  typifies  the  excessive  individualism  of  this 
age  of  democracy.  Even  in  his  conservative 
days  he  is  ardently  personal:  he  cannot  keep 


223 

self  out  of  his  creation.  Not  merely  subjective, 
like  the  romanticists,  from  whom  he  differs  by 
a  greater  intellectual  reserve,  he  carries  sub- 
jectivity into  the  things  of  the  intellect,  and  to 
justify  the  dilettantism  of  his  attitude,  exalts 
it  finally  into  a  philosophy.  Hence  his  skepti- 
cism, eager  to  show  the  relativity  of  other  men's 
realities,  rising  under  attack  to  a  devotion 
toward  philosophic  nihilism  which  is  a  devo- 
tion to  his  own  form  of  dialectic.  Barring  a 
few  years  of  pragmatism,  this  is  his  dominant 
attitude:  from  first  to  last  he  is  an  intellectual 
anarch,  reducing  all  things  to  his  measure ;  and 
in  his  reaction  against  all  absolutist  formulas 
he  has  become  a  large  figure  in  the  new  philos- 
ophy of  Humanism. 

His  pragmatic  period,  and  indeed  his  whole 
later  evolution,  reflects  our  modern  humani- 
tarian and  socialistic  interests.  A  corollary 
of  his  subjectivity,  confessedly  grounded  upon 
an  Epicurean  sensitiveness  to  pain,^^  this  social 
pity  is  still  real  enough  to  lead  him  into  thorny 
paths  for  the  sake  of  justice.  Here  at  least 
his  idealism  overrides  the  skeptic.  For  as  he 
says,  "if  the  object  for  which  one  sacrifices 
oneself  is  an  illusion,  self-sacrifice  is  none  the 
less  a  reality,  and  that  reality  is  the  most  splen- 

18  Jardin,  p.  56. 


224 

did  adornment  that  man  can  put  upon  his  moral 
nakedness.'""  And  though,  to  him,  "earth  is 
only  a  grain  of  sand  in  an  infinite  desert  of 
celestial  worlds,"  none  the  less  he  adds:  "But 
if  men  suflfer  only  upon  earth,  it  is  greater  than 
all  the  rest  of  the  universe.  . .  .It  is  everything 
and  the  rest  is  nothing  at  all."^° 

How  different  this  attitude  from  the  roman- 
tic contempt  of  ordinary  humanity,  from  that 
hatred  of  the  bourgeois  which  all  his  life  held 
Flaubert  aloof  in  the  artist's  aristocratic  pride. 
Yet  Anatole  France  is  one  with  Flaubert  in  his 
cult  of  art.  He  too  has  that  devotion  to  style, 
born  of  romantic  example  and  grown  into  a 
religion  with  the  Parnassian  poets  and  the 
author  of  Salammho.  Primarily  a  stylist,  even 
his  reaction  against  Le  Parnasse,  his  rejection 
of  their  "splendid"  diction  for  a  classical  sim- 
plicity, is  still  a  devotion  to  form,  a  devotion 
whose  labors  only  a  stylist  can  fully  under- 
stand. To  the  end  he  remains  in  spirit  a  Par- 
nassian, polishing  his  seemingly  artless  phrases 
until  all  trace  of  effort  or  workmanship  is  filed 
away.  So  for  him  there  is  no  unconscious  sim- 
plicity. "A  good  style  is  like  yonder  beam  of 
light,  which  owes  its  pure  brilliance  to  the  in- 
timate combination  of  the  seven  colors  which 

!•  Livre  de  mon  ami,  p.  124.  20  Jar  din,  p.  56. 


225 

compose  it.  A  simple  style  is  like  white  light: 
it  is  complex,  but  it  does  not  seem  so.  In  lan- 
guage, true  simplicity  is  only  apparent,  and 
springs  merely  from  the  fine  coordination  and 
sovereign  blending  of  its  several  parts."" 

A  conscious  artist,  he  is  ever  seeking  a 
greater  perfection.  Remodeling  SylvestreBon- 
nard  in  1900,  he  ponders  every  phrase  and 
particle  in  his  effort  to  improve  its  delicate 
rhythm.  His  work  has  ripened  from  the  be- 
ginning, until  in  Histoire  contemporaine  its 
finish  and  contexture  are  rich  enough  to  dis- 
pense with  constructive  unity.  But  even  Le 
Manneqin  d'osier  is  not  so  fine  as  the  art  of 
Les  Dieux  ont  soif,  so  carefully  polished,  so 
delicately  evasive  of  all  that  is  tedious  or  ob- 
vious, so  full  of  pages  which  haunt  the  memory 
like  the  cadences  of  Walter  Pater  or  the  songs 
of  Paul  Verlaine.  Some  of  its  episodes  may  be 
open  to  criticism,  but  the  style  is  perfection 
itself. 

The  charm  of  these  pages  is  indeed  hard  to 
analyze.  Always  one  feels  the  intellectual  qual- 
ities underneath,  the  philosophy,  the  humor.  It 
is  the  charm  of  ironical  detachment,  the  mask 
so  often  adopted  by  the  disillusioned  idealist. 
It  is  a  universal  irony — seen  not  merely  in  the 

21  Ibid.,  p.  107. 


226 

art  of  inverted  statement  which  Coignard  and 
Bergeret  take  from  Voltaire ;  it  is  also  the  im- 
passive irony  of  Flaubert,  recounting  in  cold 
moderation  abuses  which  clamor  for  emotional 
treatment,  for  the  lash  of  sarcasm  or  indigna- 
tion. And  with  all  this  it  is  the  irony  of  Renan, 
those  indefinable  overtones  of  an  ironic  tem- 
perament, divided  between  imagination  and  in- 
tellect. Poised  condor-like  over  a  serio-comic 
universe,  this  fantastic  humor  seizes  contrasts 
which  startle  or  appal. 

If  primarily  intellectual,  his  charm  is  also 
due  to  qualities  which  belong  to  the  poet  as 
well  as  the  philosopher.  The  art  of  Anatole 
France  is  a  product  of  his  imagination,  his  taste, 
and  his  musical  sense.  Symbolic  of  his  whole 
creation  is  his  statement  concerning  the  ballad 
which  first  revealed  to  him  the  virtue  of  poetry: 
"In  my  prose  will  be  found  the  disjecta  membra 
of  the  poet."  This  is  plain  enough  when  his 
work  is  read  aloud.  Only  thus  can  one  realize  the 
flexibility  of  his  diction,  which  runs  the  whole 
gamut  of  melodic  quality  without  ever  losing 
its  purity  or  its  power  to  express  his  changing 
moods:  a  flexibility  which  gives  the  reader  all 
the  delicacy  of  the  impression,  in  a  music  which 
seems  stolen  from  the  very  flute  of  Pan. 

Yet  with  all  his  sensuousness  he  rarely  falls 


227 

into  stylistic  exaggeration.  His  taste  may  break 
down  as  regards  matter,  but  never  in  his  man- 
ner or  form.  It  is  this  which  keeps  him  from 
the  bathos  so  common  in  esthetic  or  rhythmic 
prose — taste  and  an  intellectuaUty  which  the 
sensation  never  quite  obscures.  They  save  him 
from  that  pitfall  of  French  writers,  rhetorical 
emphasis — from  that  love  of  sonorous  or  dra- 
matic effect  which  makes  the  theater  the  dream 
of  every  literary  Gaul.  "Dans  tous  les  genres, 
il  nous  faut  des  Marseillaises."  Taste  turns 
him  from  this  to  the  poetry  which  life  itself 
distils,  perceptible  only  to  those  whose  ears  are 
not  filled  by  noise  alone.  An  instinctive  tact 
seems  to  have  led  him  naturally  to  the  Greeks, 
rather  than  to  the  oratorical  Romans  so  dear  to 
French  classicism,  and  when  his  old  Ciceronian 
professor  of  rhetoric  criticized  him  on  this 
point,  suggesting  that  he  read  "the  complete 
works  of  Casimir  Delavigne,"  he  felt  already 
that  he  had  found  something  better.  "Sopho- 
cles had  given  me  a  certain  bent  which  I  could 
not  undo.""  And  all  through  his  life  that  same 
taste  has  kept  his  genius  from  the  contamina- 
tion of  northern  literatures,  making  him  the 
most  truly  classical  of  all  the  moderns.  Alone 
among    contemporaries,  Anatole  France   has 

22  Livre  de  mon  ami,  p.  170. 


228 

grafted  the  living  flower  of  Hellas  upon  the 
Gallo-Latin  logic  of  form. 

"You  are  the  genius  of  Greece  made  French," 
said  Alfred  Croiset  in  his  memorable  tribute  to 
Anatole  France.  "You  have  taken  from  Greece 
her  gift  of  subtle  dialectic,  of  smiling  irony,  of 
words  which  seem  endowed  with  wings,  of 
poetry  delicate  yet  definite  and  full  of  luminous 
reason;  and  you  have  shed  upon  that  Greek 
beauty  the  grace  of  the  Ile-de-France,  the  grace 
which  invests  her  familiar  landscapes,  and 
which  also  lends  its  beauty  to  the  style  of  our 
dearest  writers,  those  who  are  most  delight- 
fully French." 

Greek,  yet  subtly  national,  this  is  why  Ana- 
tole France  has  taken  his  place  among  the  great 
French  classics.  This  is  why  he  must  remain  a 
classic.  For  if  literature  is  the  least  durable 
of  all  the  arts,  dependent  as  it  is  upon  words 
and  metaphors  which  never  cease  to  change, 
he  alone  in  his  generation  has  chosen  the  sim- 
plicity which  suffers  least  from  time.  In  the 
last  fifteen  years,  a  new  literature  and  a  new 
hope  have  succeeded  the  pessimism  consequent 
upon  1870,  and  when  the  tinkling  poets  and 
morbid  self-dissecting  novelists  are  forgotten, 
when  the  sickly  symbolism  or  the  cruder  sen- 
suality of  the  end  of  the  century  has  passed  like 


229 

a  cloud  in  the  cold,  bright,  windswept  dawn  of 
to-morrow,  we  shall  remember  Anatole  France. 
A  monument  of  that  discouraged  era,  when  life 
itself  forced  the  artist  into  the  esoteric,  his 
books  will  best  recall  the  delicate  age  which 
found  its  object  in  an  Epicurean  cult  of  art 
and  self.  For  he  alone  has  avoided  the  formal 
dangers  of  its  romantic  subjectivity,  building 
not  in  agate  nor  in  porphyry,  but  in  the  cool 
yet  glowing  marbles  of  the  Greeks. 

A  new  age  is  upon  us,  an  age  whose  first 
reaction  will  be  toward  Life.  The  cult  of  the 
self — "that  pearl  of  degeneration,"  as  a  social- 
ist poet  calls  it — will  probably  perish.  But  art 
will  not  perish;  and  in  art,  we  know,  works 
without  grace  are  of  no  avail.  We  shall  return 
to  Anatole  France  some  day,  come  back  to  his 
work  as  the  traveler  returns  to  Athens,  for  the 
beauty  that  is  hers.  As  on  the  Acropolis,  we 
shall  think  of  the  labors  which  built  the  temple, 
reared  and  polished  with  infinite  pains,  and 
wonder  why  such  a  devoted  artisan  should  have 
suflfered  the  reproach  of  hedonism.  We  shall 
marvel  at  a  lost  ideal,  at  a  perfection  impossible 
to  a  time  which  will  have  so  much  to  do.  And 
we  shall  return  to  our  workaday  world  tem- 
pered and  exalted  by  a  devotion  to  art  which  is 
also  a  devotion  to  truth. 


CHRONOLOGY   OF  THE   PRINCIPAL   WORKS   OF 
ANATOLE  FRANCE. 


CHRONOLOGY    OF    THE    PRINCIPAL 
WORKS  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE. 

(BORN  1844.) 

1868  Alfred  de  Vigny,  etude. 
1873  Les  Poemes  dores. 

1875  Les  poemes  de  J.  Breton,  etude. 
Racine  et  Nicole. 

Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre,  notice. 

1876  Les  Noces  corinthiennes. 

1879  Lucile  de  Chateaubriand,  etude. 
Jocaste  et  le  Chat  maig^e. 

1881  Le  Crime  de  Sylvestre  Bonnard. 

1882  Les  Desirs  de  Jean  Servien. 

1883  Abeille. 

1885  Le  Livre  de  mon  ami. 

1886  Nos  Enfants.  ' 
1888-1892  La  Vie  litteraire,  4  volumes^ 

1890  Balthasar. 
Thais. 

1892  L'Etui  de  nacre. 

1893  La  Rotisserie  de  la  reine  Pedauque. 
Les  Opinions  de  M.  Jerome  Coignard. 

1894  Le  Lys  rouge. 

Le  Jardin  d'Epicure, 


234 

1895  Le  Puits  de  Sainte-Claire. 

1897  Discours  de  reception. 
Le  Mannequin  d'osier. 
L'Orme  du  mail. 

1898  Au  petit  bonheur,  proverbe  dramatique. 
La  LeQon  bien  apprise. 

1899  L'Anneau  d'amethyste. 
Pierre  Noziere. 

1900  Clio. 

Filles  et  gargons. 

1901  Monsieur  Bergeret  a  Paris. 

1902  L'affaire  Crainquebille. 
Opinions  sociales. 

1903  Histoire  comique. 

1904  Crainquebille,  Putois,  Riquet,  etc. 

1905  L'Eglise  et  la  Republique. 
Sur  la  pierre  blanche. 

1906  Vers  les  temps  meilleurs. 

1908  L'lle  des  Pingouins. 

1909  La  Vie  de  Jeanne  d'Arc. 

Les  Contes  de  Jacques  Toumebroche. 
Les  sept  femmes  de  la  Barbe-Bleue,  etc. 

1910  Aux  etudiants,  discours. 

1912  La  comedie  de  celui  qui  epousa  unefemmemuette. 
Les  Dieux  ont  soif. 

1913  Le  Genie  latin. 

1914  La  Revoke  des  anges. 

1915  Sur  la  voie  glorieuse. 

1916  Ce  que  disent  nos  Morts. 

(A  series  of  English  translations,  now  nearing  completion, 
is  published  by  John  Lane,  New  York.) 


INDEX 


INDEX. 


Abbe  Prevost,  L',  80. 

Abbesse  de  Jotiarre,  L',  191. 

Abeille,    53,   61. 

Acadetnie  Frangaise,  40,    129. 

Action,  belief  in,   149,  219;  denial 

of,   164. 
Actualism,    130. 
Agnosticism,  25,   133. 
Alexandrian   age,   26,  66. 
Altruism,    149. 
Amant  salamandre,    106. 
America,   172. 
Amycus  et  Celestin,   73. 
Anarchism,  idealistic,   120. 
Anjou,  7. 

Anneau  d'amSthyste,  L',    142(7. 
Anticlericalism,  134,  139,  142,  160, 

165. 
Antimilitarism,  see  Militarism. 
Anti-Semitism,    142,    160,    165. 
Apollo  in  Picardy,   116. 
Apuleius,   76,   115. 
Armenian  massacres,  167. 
Arria  Marcella,  66. 
Art,  cult  of,  224,  229;  theory  of, 

2Z>  24,  97. 
Asceticism,   8fF. 
Astronomy,   physical,   97. 
Aube,  L',  74. 
Aulus  GelHus,  76f. 
Auteur  d  un  ami,  L',  35. 

Balthasar,  62ff,  103,  124. 
Ealzac,    15,   222. 
Barres,   97. 


Baudelaire,  23,   66,  82. 

Bayle,   Peter,    loS. 

Beauty,  Greek,  18,  34,  92,  228; 
theory  of,  87. 

Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre,  9,  41, 
80,  83. 

Bible,  3f,  6,  8,  34.  91.  is6- 

BibliotMque  socialiste,   160,   166. 

Boccaccio,    117. 

Boethius,    107. 

Boulanger,  194. 

Bourget,  39,  95,  137,   161. 

Boutet  de  Monvel,  61. 

Bride  of  Corinth,  34. 

Brotherhood,  of  man,  vii;  univer- 
sal,   134;   see  also   Pacifism. 

Brunetiere,  89,  90. 

Buddhism,  29,  70. 

Candid  e,   104,  126. 
Capital  punishment,   1 12. 
Capitalism,   167,   194. 
Carez,  Frangois,  4n. 
Cazotte,    106. 
Cellini,    104. 

Cent  Nouvelles  nouvelles,  201. 
Chanteur  de  Kytne,  Le,  i78f. 
Chasseur  bibliographe,  Le,  26. 
Charavay,  Etienne,  22,  30,  40. 
Chat  Maigre,  Le,  4 iff,   156. 
Chateaubriand,  Lucile  de,   41,   80, 

83f. 
Chemise,  La,    I98if,   201,  214. 
Claretie,  Jules,  84. 
Class  justice,   143. 


238 


Classicism,    50,   84,   22?  '.^et   also 

Greece,   etc. 
Clio.    155,   157.   I77fff  182. 
Comedie  de  celui  qui  ipousa  une 
'      femme  muette,  201. 
Communism,   i49f. 
Comte  de  Gabalis,  Le,  losf. 
Consolatione  PhUosophiae,  De,  107. 
Constant,  Benjamin,  80. 
Conte  pour  commencer  I'annie, 

160. 
Contes  de  Jacques  Tournebroche, 

Les,  202. 
Ctainquebille,    i58iT,    168. 
Crime  de  Sylvestre  Bonnard,  Le, 

41,    43.    4Sff.    183,   225. 
Criticism,  literary,  8off,  85£F,  9if; 

theory  of,  89. 
Croiset,  Alfred,   228. 
Curiosity,     113,    215;    intellectual, 

II,   169;  romantic,   106. 
Cynicism,  x,   145. 

Dame  de  Verone,  La,   117. 

Danse  des  marts,  La,  30. 

Dante,   122,    181,    185,   194. 

Darwin,  ix,   24,  28,  39,  42,   $2. 

Daudet,  39,  43. 

Daumier,  12. 

Degas,   161. 

Democracy,  43,   112,  133,  222. 

Denon,    Vivant,    96. 

Denys  de  Syracuse,  2$. 

Des  P^riers,  201. 

Disirs  de  Jean  Servien,  Les,  43!!, 

54- 
Determinism,  24,  41,   144. 
Diable  amoureux,  Le,   106. 
Diable  boiteux,  Le,  40. 
Dialogues  philosophiques,  85. 
Dickens,  43. 
Dieux  ont  soif,  Les,  12,  74,  i87ff, 

225. 
Dilettantism,  ix,  70,  Ssf,  109,  211. 
Disciple,  Le,  95. 
Discours  aux  itudiants,   51. 
Disillusion,  84,   108,   136,  195,  220, 

225;  see  also  Illusion. 
Don  Quixote,  56. 


Doubt,  philosophic,  87f,   113,  219; 

see  also  Skepticism. 
Dreyfus,  ix,  94,  99,  120,  134,  I38ff, 

147,   165,   178,   19s,  209. 

Education,  popular,   161. 

Eglise  et  la  Ripublique,  L',   i6sf. 

Epicureanism,    10,    27,    125,    162; 

intellectual,    54,    86,    217!?;    set 

also  Hedonism. 
Epicurus,   28,   108,    116,    181. 
Euripides,  17,  31,  52. 
Etui  de  nacre,  L',  jifl,  103. 

Fabre,   Ferdinand,    129. 

Fairy-tales,  53,  56,  57,  61,  65. 

Farinata  degli  Uberti,   181. 

Faust,  219. 

Fille  de  Cain,  La,  29. 

Fille  de  LUith,  La,  65. 

Flaubert,    42,    69f,    124,    130,    132, 

178,    182,   222,   224,   226. 
Fra  Angelico,  73. 
France,  26,  122,  142,  151,  167,  172, 

209. 
Francis,  Saint,   108,   114,   117,   120, 

145- 
Franklin,   204. 
French  Revolution,   7,    12,   74,   76, 

79,  i87flf. 

Gallio,  i6g{{. 

Gautier,  Theophile,  23,  27,  30,  34, 

36,  6sf. 
Gazette  rimee.  La,  25. 
GSnie  latin,  Le,  40,  80. 
Germany,   26,    139,   i67f,   172,   208. 
Germinal,  93,  187. 
Gestas,   122. 
Goethe,  34,  46,  89. 
Golden  Ass,    The,    115. 
Greece,   Genius  of,   31,   228. 
Greek,    beauty,    18,    34,    92,    228; 

paganism,     29;     philosophy,     25; 

skeptics,  69;  view  of  life,  31,  50. 

Hedonism,    67,    96;    humanitarian, 

188;  intellectual,  212. 
Heptamiron,  L',  40. 


239 


HeracHtus,  219. 

Htstoire  comique,  42,  S4»  ifiiff- 

Histoire  contemporaine,  124,  i3off, 
139,  i4iff,  i46flF,  155,  is8£F,  160, 
i77>   i94<  222,   225. 

Hohenzollern,    168. 

Homai,  28. 

Homer,  17,  31,  179;  see  also  Odys- 
sey. 

Horace,   190. 

Hroswitha  of  Gandersheim,  67. 

Hugo,  Victor,  92. 

Humaine  tragedie,  L',   J17S,  202. 

Humanism,   223. 

Humanitarianism,   114,   120,  223. 

Hypnotism,   62. 

Idealism,  ixf,   190,  211,  225. 

lie  des  Pingouins,  L',  J91S,  195, 
201. 

Illusion,  23,  35,  87;  see  also  Dis- 
illusion. 

Imagination,  56,  186,  211. 

India,   24f. 

Intuition,   historic,    iSsf. 

Irony,  46,  i36ff,  200;  and  pity, 
123,  138;  nihilistic,  162;  univer- 
sal, 225. 

Jardin  d'Epicure,  he,  124S,  129, 
147,   156,   183. 

Jocaste,  4iflf,  6s,  69,   163,   195. 

Jean  Coq  et  Jean  Mouton,  201. 

Joan  of  Arc,  11,  133,  i83fF. 

Jongleur  de  Notre-Dame,  Le,  73. 

Joyeux  Buffalmacco,  Le,   117,  202. 

Justice,  112,  133,  148,  is8fr;  so- 
cial, 150,  168. 

Komm  I'Atribate,   179S. 

La  Bruy^re,  168. 

La  Fayette,  Madame  de,  80. 

La  Fontaine,  40,  80,  201. 

Laeta  Acilia,  66. 

Lamarck,   52. 

Lang,  Andrew,    186. 

Laplace,   185. 

Leconte  de  Lisle,  23,  28,  40. 

Le  Sage,  80,  84. 


Lemaitre,  Jules,  14,  87. 
Leopold  of  Belgium,    198. 
I.esseps,  Ferdinand  de,   129. 
Lives  of  the  Saints,  8,  66. 
Livy,   17. 
Livre  de  mon  ami,  Le,  4ff,  21,  45, 

S3fr,  61,  74,  79,  8s,  147,  156- 
Lucretius,    188. 
Luzy,  Madame  de,  74. 
Lys  rouge,  Le,   54,   i2iff,    i6if. 

Malade  imaginaire,  Le,  198. 

Manet,  49. 

Mannequin  d' osier,  Le,   130S,  135, 

159,   225- 
Manon  Lescaut,  40. 
Marat,    187,   189. 
Marbode  aux  enfers,   194. 
Marcus  Aurelius,   69,    164. 
Mare  au  diable.  La,  95. 
Marguerite  de  Navarre,  80. 
Maupassant,   39,    160,    162. 
Memoires  d'un  volontaire,  74. 
Messer  Guido  Cavalcanti,  116. 
Militarism,    112,    114,     133,    i38flF, 

143,    148,   166,    168. 
Millet,  221. 
Miracle    du    grand    Saint-Nicolas, 

Le,  197. 
Miracles  of  the  Virgin,  The,   117. 
MoHere,   40,   80,   84,   201. 
Moliere,  40,  80. 
Monde  comme  il  va,  Le,  191. 
Monde  moral,  Le,  83. 
Monsieur  Bergeret  d  Paris,   146S, 

15s,   168. 
Monsieur  Pigeonneau,  65. 
Montaigne,  84,  86,  90,  96,  211. 
Morality,   163;   Christian,    108. 
Moreas,  Jean,   97. 
Morris,   William,    172. 
Mart,  La,  29. 
Mort   du  loup.   La,   23. 
Mucha,  Alphonse,   182. 
Muiron,  La,  182. 
Mystire  du  Sang,  Le,  117. 

Napoleon,    117,    182. 
Naturalism,  41,  43if,  94,  178. 


240 


Nerval,  Gerard  de,  62,   122. 

Nietzsche,   125. 

Nihilism,  vii,  126,  162;    philosophic, 

69. 
Noces  corinthiennes,  Les,  3 iff,  66, 

68,  70. 
Nodier,  61  f. 
Noel  du  Fail,   200. 
Nos  En f ants,  61. 

Odyssey,  17,  21,  56,   157,  178. 
CEuf  rouge,  L',  65. 
Ohnet,  Georges,  92. 
Opinions    de    Monsieur    JSrome 

Coignard,  Les,  iioff,  129. 
Opinions  sociales,  160. 
Optimism,   149. 
Orme  du  mail,  L',   14,   124,   i^ott, 

1 6s,   177- 

Pacifism,  vii,   138,   i66f;  208. 
Panfagruel,  201. 
Pantheism,  neo-Greek,  27. 
Parnassians,  the,  23  fT,  4off,  80,  97, 

224. 
Pascal,  Blaise,  87,    109,   188. 
Pater,  Walter,   116,  225. 
Paul  et  Virginie,  40. 
Patriotism,   139,   148,   167,  207flf. 
Peau  de  chagrin,  La,  15. 
Feladan,  97. 

Pensees  de  Riquet,   i68. 
Perrault,  61. 
Pessimism,  vii,  x,  36,  98,  112,  126, 

141,   I44f,   i62ff,  213. 
Petite  ville.  La,  209. 
Petit  soldat  de  plomb,  Le,  74. 
Petronius,  200. 

Pierre  Nosiire,  38?,  issf,  177,  209. 
Plagiarism,  216. 
Plato,  87. 
Poe,  94. 

Poimes  antiques,  Les,  25,  29. 
Podmes  barbares,  Les,  24,   27,  29. 
Poimes  doris,  Les,  25,  27ft. 
Pope,  Alexander,   losf. 
Freraphaelitism,   122,   194. 
Prevost,  Abbe,  80,  83,   110. 
PrUre  sur  I'Acropole,  La,  51,  167. 


Procurateur  de  JudSe,  Le,  53,  riflf, 

171. 
Promenades  de  Pierre  Noeiire  en 

France,   156. 
Protagoras,   87. 

Putts   de   Sainte-Claire,   Le,    iisflf. 
Puritanism,  68. 
Pyrrhonism,  69,  85,  219. 

Rabelais,    117,  20of. 

Racine,  31,  40,  69,  80,  82,  84,  2  to. 

Racine  et  Nicole,  41. 

Radicalism,    11,   129,   150. 

Rape  of  the  Lock,  The,   105. 

Rationalism,   108. 

Realism,   24,    130,    143,    I77f,    213, 

222. 
Reason,    108,    166;     confidence  in, 

98;    rejection   of,    114;   see   also 

Science. 
Relativism,  86. 
Renan,  Ernest,  ix,   14,  27,  3sf,  48, 

8sf,  89fT,  123,  156,  167,  171,  174, 

184,   191,  203,   226. 
Revolte  des  anges,  La,  202. 
Robespierre,    187,    iSgi. 
Robinson   Crusoe,    56. 
Rodin,    178. 
Roi  bait,  Le,  181. 
Romanticism,   24,    124,   2iof,   222. 
Rosicrucian  philosophy,   losf. 
Rotisserie    de   la   reine   Pedauque, 

La,    i04ff,    177,   204. 
Rousseau,  Jean-Jacques,   189. 
Ruskin,   194. 

Sainte-Beuve,  80,  84,   161,  221. 

Sainte  Euphrosine,  73. 

Sainte  Oliverie  et  Sainte  Liberette, 

73- 
San  Satiro,   nsf. 
Satanism,  66. 
Satire,    igiflf. 

Salammbo,  24,   124,  178,  224. 
Scarron,  80,  84,   162. 
Science,   ix,   24,   35,    52f,   63f,   84, 

112,  166;  see  also  Doubt. 
Scolastica,  73, 
Scott,  Walter,  2^2. 


241 


Seneca,  171. 

Sensibiliti  nerveuse,  82,  210,  212. 

Sept    femmes    de    la    Barbe-bleue, 

Les,   i96f. 
Shakespeare,   89. 
Skepticism,  vii,  22,  25,  35,  43,  69, 

84ff,  95f,  98,  108,  125,  156,  211, 

216. 
Socialism,  97,   iii,    114.   116,   138, 

150,  223. 
Sociology,    146. 
Sophocles,   17,  227. 
Spiritism,    94. 
Stendhal,   137. 
Stoicism,  68,    170,    171. 
Subjectivism,  91;  experimental,  97; 

literary,  theory  of,  88ff. 
Suggestion,  62. 

Sur  la  pierre  blanche,    i69ff,    195. 
Sur  la  vote  glorieuse,  2o8f. 
Sur  une  signature  de  Marie  Stuart, 

30. 
Swinburne,  28. 

Tacitus,   171. 

Taine,  7,  24,  89,  163. 

Telepathy,  97. 

Tentation    de    Saint-Antoine,    La, 

62,  68f. 
Terre,  La,   93. 
Thais,  26. 
Thais,  vii,  9,  31,  53,  66ff,  103,  124, 

203,  222. 
Theocrite,  80. 
Theocritus,   31. 
Thibault,  Jacques-Anatole,  6. 
Thibault,  Noel,  6f. 


Thomas  Aquinas,  Saint,  185. 

Tintoretto,  68. 

Titian,  68. 

Tolstoy,   120,   145. 

Trublions,   Les,   201. 

Truth,    133,    164;   in  the  abstract, 

99;  objective,  89;  pragmatic,  146; 

theory  of,   ii8f. 

Utopias,    17 iff,    i94f. 

Vasari,    1  i6f. 

Venusberg,  Le,  30. 

Verlaine,  Paul,  25,   122,  225. 

Vers  les  temps  tneilleurs,   166,  177. 

Victime  volontaire.  La,  75. 

Vie  de  Jeanne  d'Arc,  La,  i83ff. 

191,  196. 
Vie  de  Sainte-Radegonde,  La,  66. 
Vie  litteraire,  La,   54,  67,   69,  81, 

Ssff,    95ff,    106,    109,    114,    I24f, 

157,  183. 
Vigrny,  Alfred  de,  23. 
Vigny,  Alfred  de,  26,  40,  80. 
Villiers  de  I'lsle-Adam,    122. 
Virgil,    17,   21,   26,   50,    194. 
Voltaire,   7,   13,  90,    103,   105,   no, 

193,    I97t   200,   2iof,   226. 
Voyages  itnaginaires,  106. 

War,  X,   133,  204,  207ff. 
Wells,  H.  G.,   172. 
Whistler,   16,  49. 
Wilde,  Oscar,   173. 

Zola,   92,   93f,   99,    130,    i4of,    144, 
167,  178. 


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